216 The Kasokwa Forest chimpanzees
trap placed near a mango tree in a local garden; he dragged and carried the trap, which
had snapped shut across his right hand, for seven days before dying of gangrene. His
right leg had been lost previously in an earlier encounter with a leg-hold trap. His case
and the post mortem that followed it were described in Chapter 9.
Within a short time of Kigere’s death, a new adult male, together with an adult female
and her infant, joined the community. Where this male came from is not known; he may
have come from the main Budongo block to the north, or he may have come from one of
the forest outliers further south. However, these individuals seem to have been attracted
by the mango trees and not by the absence of an alpha male because they did not interact
with the Kasokwa community and disappeared when the mango season was over, leaving
the Kasokwa community without a mature adult male.
More conflict followed. In July 2000 one of the chimpanzees (thought to be either
Kemoso or Sukari) seized an 8-month-old human baby boy near Kihuura village where
immigrants had cleared a patch of forest and settled. The baby’s mother had left it
unattended while she dug her field by the forest edge. The baby was carried up into a
tree in the forest, bitten, and subsequently dropped onto the forest floor where it was
later found by one of our Kasokwa research assistants, Alfred. No part of it had been
eaten. The baby was rushed to hospital but died on the way. Our project director attend-
ed the burial and made a contribution to the burial costs, explaining that this was on
humanitarian grounds and not an admission of responsibility or any kind of official
compensation. It was said by local people that the immigrants (or ‘squatters’) whose
child it was had settled too close to the forest and had been in the habit of shouting
and throwing stones at the Kasokwa chimpanzees when they came crop-raiding. The
local people did not want squatters there, but were understandably aggrieved and hostile
to the Kasokwa chimpanzees and vowed to kill any chimpanzee that came into their
vicinity.
In part because of these conflicts, early in October 2000 the indistinct boundaries of
the Kasokwa Forest Reserve were re-demarcated by officials from the Forest Department
and encroachers were identified. There were 81 encroachers, in 25 families. They were
given the alternatives of moving to new land, renting or leaving to return to their home
areas. The encroachment that actually threatened the existence of Kasokwa Forest was
thus temporarily halted.
In 2001, according to Kyamanywa (pers. comm.) the Kasokwa chimpanzees started
to take chickens, 9 from one farmer and 3 from another. It began to look as if they were
increasingly desperate for food. While their image in the eyes of local people is thus
deteriorating, we should not blame them. Their actions are the direct result of human
interventions in their habitat. The bad character now attributed to them in this area is
wholly understandable; human beings equally threatened would react in similar ways.
Further cases of trapping
A report by Dr Richard Ssuna, veterinarian of the JGI and the Chimpanzee Sanctuary
and Wildlife Conservation Trust (CSWCT), details a case of a chimpanzee trapped at the