Wildlife

Animals are Collateral Damage in Africa

Wildlife in more than 70 percent of Africa’s nature preserves was decimated by the ravages of war between 1946 and 2010, causing populations to enter what a new report describes as a “downward spiral.”

Writing in the journal Nature, Joshua Daskin and Robert Pringle of Princeton University point to the deaths of 90 percent of the large herbivores in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park during that country’s decades-long struggle for liberation from Portugal and subsequent civil war.

The decline in wildlife across Africa has also been compounded by poaching for ivory, hides and other animal parts, often sold on the black market to purchase weapons.