Snare injuries at other sites 189Uganda and perhaps other parts of Africa will adopt the live-trap approach to
chimpanzee conservation.^76
Snare injuries at other sites
Kano (1984) described a number of snare-related ape injuries in the bonobos of Wamba,
DRC. Hashimoto (1999) has written about the injuries of the chimpanzees of the
Kalinzu Forest: of 16 male chimpanzees identified, 2 had a wire snare embedded in their
hand, while another 7 had injuries on their limbs probably caused by snares, including
loss of hand or foot, claw hand or wrist, and loss of digits.
Wrangham and Goldberg (1997) quantified the amount of snaring of chimpanzees
in Kibale Forest. Over a period of 300 ‘snareable chimpanzee years’, 11 snares were
recorded (snareable chimpanzees were defined as chimpanzees aged 6 years or over).
Of 55 snareable chimpanzees in the Kanyawara community at Kibale, 18 showed snare
damage as follows: lost hand, 4, lame hand, 5, lame finger, 2, crippled toes, 1. A sex dif-
ference was found, with 9/19 (47%) of males and 9/36 (25%) of females having snare
damage. These proportions are horrific. We should note that Kibale Forest was not
a National Park during most of the period when these snare injuries came about, it was
a Forest Reserve until 1993, and that a bushmeat trade was already operational there.
Fig. 9.13: Release of an adult female chimpanzee and her infant, feet just visible as it clings below
her belly, from a live-trap (photo: C. Byarugaba).
(^76) There is, it has to be said, a downside to live-traps. They require regular maintenance (replacing poles
and nails that fall out). Responsibility for maintenance is not always clear when traps are placed between fields
or on communal land. Also, baboons have an excellent record of learning how to avoid dangerous sites and
objects, and we should not be surprised if in the future they avoid the baited live-traps completely.