AR-News: (UK) He saved the elephant. But can he save the Great Apes?

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

Independent.co.uk

5 May 2004 20:28
Richard Leakey transformed world opinion by setting fire to Kenya's ivory 
stockpile. Now he is turning his attention to an even greater crisis. Michael 
McCarthy reports
06 May 2004 
The giant panda has served its purpose, says Richard Leakey, the grand old 
man of African wildlife. We need a new international icon to represent 
threatened species, and he knows what it should be: an image of the great apes.
The precipitous decline of the gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos (pygmy 
chimpanzees) and orang-utans is the most urgent of all the world's conservation 
problems, says the man who 15 years ago highlighted the poaching threat to the 
elephant by setting fire to a stockpile of ivory in Kenya.
"I'm not suggesting for a moment there are no problems with the panda, or 
with the elephant," he says. "I just think the great apes problem is far greater. 
Switching the focus from the panda to the great apes as an icon for 
threatened, endangered species, would send a very loud and important message to the 
world."
At 59, Mr Leakey is perhaps the most celebrated of white Africans. A Kenyan 
politician, civil servant and conservationist, he is a silver-haired 
Hemingway-like figure who lost both his legs in an air crash in 1993 and who now walks 
on artificial limbs with no crutches, but a sailor's rolling gait.
The son of the palaeontologist Louis Leakey, who discovered man's oldest 
fossil remains in the Olduvai gorge of what is now Tanzania, Richard Leakey is a 
third-generation Kenyan who began in palaeontology himself and achieved 
eminence, but switched in his middle years to conservation, to achieve more eminence 
still.
He ran the Kenyan Wildlife Service from 1989 to 1994, taking a tough line 
with poachers, then left government to found an opposition political party, 
SAFINA, becoming public enemy number one for the Kenyan president, Daniel arap Moi.
He returned to Moi's government to run the civil service as Secretary to the 
Cabinet - "I thought I would try to change things from the inside" - before 
resigning in frustration. But his commitment to wildlife conservation remains 
undimmed, and now the great apes are his primary focus.
He is in London preparing for a fund-raising dinner a fortnight on Monday, at 
which he will appeal to the British Government to add the plight of the great 
apes to its professed concerns for Africa, emphasised this week with the 
launching of the Commission for Africa by Prime Minister Tony Blair.
full story:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=518583 

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    "The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those 
rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of 
tyranny. The question is not can they REASON, nor can they TALK, but can they 
SUFFER?" 
Jeremy Bentham 1748 - 1832 



         
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