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godzilla 23 October 2006 Endangered & Extinction, Habitat 127 views One Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

reuters

Hippos at a national park in Congo’s war-torn east could be wiped out by the end of the year unless action is taken to stop rebel militia slaughtering them for their meat and ivory, conservationists said.

Experts say more than 400 hippos have been killed by Mai Mai fighters in the last two weeks in Virunga National Park, which once boasted Africa’s greatest concentration of the beasts.

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said a recent survey found less than 900 hippos remaining in the remote jungle park, compared with 22,000 recorded there in 1988.
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Virunga, on Democratic Republic of Congo’s border with Rwanda, is Africa’s oldest national park and once boasted the highest density of large mammals in the world.

But in the last 10 years it has also been at the heart of two wars, during which poaching spiralled out of control and a plethora of national armies and rebel groups fought over territory and natural resources.

Rwanda’s 1994 genocide led to an influx of refugees and militia fighters in the area, followed by DRC’s 1998-2003 war, which sucked in foreign forces and resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe that killed some 4 million people.

(pix from www.pbs.org)