Those smiling chimpanzees beloved by circus-goers have turned out to be childkillers. Last week, officials of the Jane Goodall Institute in Uganda - which is dedicated to preserving chimps - were quoted in BBC's Wildlife Magazine as saying chimpanzees had killed eight children, and injured many others in Ugandan national parks. The Ugandan government is taking urgent steps to prevent the revelations from damaging the valuable trade in tourists who come to visits its chimps and mountain gorillas.Debby Cox, the director of the institute, said the aggressive behaviour of the chimps was caused by closer proximity between the animals and humans.Ugandan wildlife officials responded by assuring that chimp attacks are on the decline in recent years. This is partly the result of the government creating extensive buffer zones between wildlife reserves and human settlements. They said increased human encroachment on game sanctuaries and accompanying large-scale deforestation, had caused a rise in chimpanzee attacks on humans and some deaths.Experts disagree on why exactly the chimps attack people. Dr Michael Gavin, who carried out the study reported on by Wildlife Magazine, said the technique used by the chimps to kill or maim the children mirrors the way they tear apart other prey, suggesting that they were motivated by hunger."In most cases they bite off the limbs first before disembowelling them, just as they would the red Columbus monkey which is one favourite prey," he said.But officials at the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre insist chimps are primarily vegetarian and they mostly attack humans only to defend their habitat.They said chimps had injured more people than they had killed, and that even the bodies of those killed were usually found intact. Until the 1960s chimps were considered to be almost purely vegetarian but the British chimp scientist Jane Goodall discovered that they are also predators which eat smaller primates.Barbara Musoke, the spokesperson of the regulatory Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), said in an interview that the killings had taken place over ten years and not all recently, as the furore over the recent BBC story might suggest.She said the attacks had subsided. There had been no attack over the past year but she could not say when the eight attacks had taken place. The attacks had happened either on the outskirts of game parks or in parts of the parks where people cultivated crops or settled illegally. Locals also go to the parks in search of fuel wood, fruits and poles to make houses, she said."We have reduced wildlife and human conflicts," she said, though this did not rule out the possibility of future attacks."We educate the public on wildlife and its behaviour and we have buffer zones at the end of park boundaries. In places with elephants and buffaloes we have built trenches to stop these animals from crossing the boundaries," Musoke said. The authority has also established wildlife reserve management committees where local communities are represented, making it easier to educate the public on living harmoniously with the wildlife.UWA officials say they are also conducting research to give them "a better sense of direction on how to handle conflicts between wildlife and humans".They are not expecting locals to hunt down the chimps, after the reports about the attacks on babies. They say locals "are aware of the importance of chimps (to tourism) and those attacks were just isolated incidents," Musoke said.Ignatius Nyakisero, the marketing manager of the Uganda Tourist Board, said next week the board would dispatch a team to the reserves to establish whether chimps were still attacking humans. They feared the tourist industry could suffer if the country did not speedily clarify that the attacks had abated and had taken place over a long time.Uganda relies on tourism, which earns it more money than its largest traditional export, coffee. In 2002 the country attracted 254 000 tourists, and projects this will have risen by about 15% in 2003. Uganda aims to attract 500 000 tourists annually by 2014.The Goodall Institute earlier this year discovered Uganda had more chimpan-zees than it had known of - 4 950, rather than the previous estimate of 3 000 to 4 000. The researchers said that this should not lead to complacency as chimps are still illegally hunted in parts of Uganda.Chimps lived in 20 Ugandan forests but only four had large enough populations to remain viable in the long term. They also said over 25% of chimps observed were missing hands or feet as a result of snares from wire traps set for antelopes.Chimps and gorillas are among the top attractions, earning over 65% of the UWA's income in the parks. But officials say gorillas are more popular; and that unlike chimps, they don't attack humans.Uganda has about 300 mountain gorillas, half of the world's population. The rest are said to be in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mountain gorillas feature in a documentary on Uganda just released by Discovery Channel.On Christmas Day, one of the gorillas gave birth, but UWA officials cannot reach the baby to ascertain its sex and name it because the mother is hostile. They are not sure whether this is due to post-natal depression or other causes."We are excited because the birth of this gorilla on Christmas Day is a big event for us and of pride to Uganda's tourism," said UWA's Musoke. The UWA has increased the numbers of game wardens and soldiers in the gorilla parks following the murder in March 1999 of eight tourists in the Bwindi Park. Communities living near game reserves often complain about animals like monkeys, baboons and elephants destroying their crops. In Kiboga district, a community of 30 000 people is battling for survival against 30 000 monkeys, which eat up their food before it ripens.Kibirige Ssebunya, the junior agriculture minister, has advised locals to start eating monkeys before they get eaten by them. Sadly - for him at least - in Uganda, unlike in Congo, monkeys are no delicacy. - Independent Foreign Service
By Wairagala Wakabi
