Even the most jaded, sensation-seeking omnivore (that would be me) has to draw the line somewhere, and I think the eating of our fellow primates is as good a place to draw it as any.
And so I was vaguely alarmed, if not really all that surprised, to learn that The Beatrice Hotel, in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo had been offering on its menu ‘bébé chimpanzé fumé.” 24 hours notice required and about £27, a pop.
This is apparently illegal because the chimpanzee is a protected species in the DRC. In fact it’s illegal ‘to hunt, injure, kill, sell or buy, gift or detain’ a protected species of animal or plant, and a criminal complaint has been lodged against the hotel by a local conservation group.
The hotel management blamed it all on a cook who’d made a ‘mistake’ and the generally expressed sentiment is that it’s those darned Asians who are driving the trade, but this isn’t 100% convincing.
Adams Cassinga of the group Conserv Congo was quoted as saying that at any given time in Kinshasa there are at least ten great apes for sale; though I think these may not all get eaten. But he also says that red-tailed monkeys are butchered in hundreds every day as ‘bush meat.’
Although I have no intention of eating chimp, or any other kind of bush meat, I did start to wonder what it tasted like. Presumably the smoking changes the flavour a lot, but I did find on Quora, a man who goes by the moniker Jonny Shortcake (possibly not his real name) who says he had monkey meat when he was Marine Corps in the Philippines undergoing jungle survival training. He doesn’t say what kind of monkey he ate, but having captured one they boiled it he concludes ‘all I can say is it’s tough and chewy it’s not unlike squirrel.’ Which, of course, begs another question.
In any case, I’m somehow glad to know that it doesn’t just taste like chicken.
Above is a chimp smoking as opposed to being smoked.
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