Dr. Duane M. Rumbaugh
Lead Scientists Emeritus
Great Ape Trust of Iowa

All of those who have looked into the eyes of an ape might well have had a life-altering experience – apes look back with knowing eyes.  They know whether the eyes are of friend or foe, of love or doubt – or even worse.  Apes don’t need long periods of time to assess who we are and what we are about.  Socially they likely are more sensitive, more intelligent than are we.

Yes, they are vulnerable to superior power – our power.  If they are to die a tragic and sudden death, it is likely because of human action.  True enough, natural forces, such as diseases that inhere in their range countries, can have devastating effects on their populations.  From such devastation they are likely to survive – at least as reproductive groups and a viable species.  But death by our power – our gunfire and traps – can, one by one, wipe them out.  With their populations reduced below some critical point, they “give up” and become extinct.

Extinction happens.  When it happens, it is final.  Species, once extinct, just don’t reappear.  They are gone forever. Perhaps more than 99 percent of the species that once graced our planet are now extinct – gone forever.  We will never see them again.

Certainly humans have their proper needs, but they do not include the right to “take it all” by reason of overpopulating Planet Earth, the right to despoil what remains for natural life forever more, the right to be uncaring stewards of essentially a beautiful planet – the one and only planet that our species will ever have.  This is especially true as we view what our planet enjoyed, boasted, and perhaps even flaunted 200 years ago – or even 100 years ago.  Over the course of but two or three generations the planet’s resource value has been reduced wastefully and opportunistically.  The planet is revolting now, so it would seem, as it declares payback time, letting itself warm at rates so dangerous that we now fear for the cataclysmic rise of oceans as the icecaps melt to bankrupt values.

Yes, countries of the world are now being energized to act to save the planet – not just for itself, but for ourselves and our children and their children.  Now is the time for action.  What must we do?

First, we must clean up our nest (e.g., our manner of living).  Second, we must nurture and constructively manage whatever is left.

All of us of at Great Ape Trust of Iowa have committed ourselves to these principles.  We and those thousands who are touched by the messages of our scientists and staff (and particularly those from our precious apes – seven bonobos and three orangutans) – know that we believe that the great apes merit serving as our flag-species.  We do not intend to diminish the merit or value of any other species by our selection of the great apes for all of nature is essential to the survival of nature on our precious planet.  True enough, the planet as a barren ball can and will, if necessary, survive – but its barrenness will reinstate no life as we know it today.

So, we are a juncture in time and space.  If we act with commitment and intelligence now, there probably is time to save much of the natural world.  If we do not, in 100 years it promises to be painfully and perhaps irrevocably on a terminal course.

It is for this very reason that we take the recent slaughtering of two mountain gorillas on Mt. Virunga, Africa, as portending a catastrophic trend.  There are roughly only 700 mountain gorillas remaining in the world.  While the loss of two of them, particularly males, does not signal their extinction, the apes are at a point in their diminishing population where the loss of even one of them by a wanton hand of destruction is unacceptable.  Furthermore, the loss of two, even one, reproductive females puts in place a real threat to viable population size and growth since not all 700 mountain gorillas are in the active reproductive pool.

We humans can no longer tacitly accept the loss of this ape and that ape – we aren’t that smart.  We must protect and value each and every one of them!

Every mountain gorilla’s life is a hope for future.  The loss of any mountain gorilla through poaching or encroachment is a crisis that announces pain today and possible extinction in the years immediately ahead.  Small populations such as those of the mountain gorilla are naturally fragile due to disease, fire, pollution, and so on.  None of them is dispensable.

Thus, we must regret, if not mourn, the recent loss of two mountain gorillas – unceremoniously slaughtered with their remains thrown into a human-waste pit. 

Political settlements will, perhaps, signal the end to such violence, such indecency to the mountain gorillas, yet we must be alert and be known not to condone such acts of violence in the future. 

In the past ten years, 97 park rangers have been killed protecting the Virunga mountain gorillas from poachers.  We salute the “boots on the ground,” the local citizens who have put their lives on the line to protect and to preserve this magnificent species. The courageous individuals place their lives in harm’s way as they strive to protect those of their charges – the mountain gorilla.

About 60 years ago, George Schaller lived on Mt. Virunga to give the world its first view of what they were like, how they lived, and the forces with which they coped.  He could not possibly have foreseen that within the short span of 50 years the mountain gorillas would now be so threatened, so endangered as a species.  He very correctly saw them having a magnificence predicated on the natural resources and beauty of the mountain and held that they should never be taken there from, lest they no longer be what they are as a species.

The mountain gorillas are at risk.  All apes serve as our flag of the Great Ape Trust of Iowa as we move to educate literally everyone of the world about the need for conservation in all that each of us does.

Moved by the tragic, even insulting, deaths suffered by the population of mountain gorillas of Mt. Virunga, let us pledge ourselves to never be indifferent about any part of world that is wantonly destroyed – just because it is there, just because by so doing it will cause someone pain or insult, just because it can be done.

We strive to supplant the pain of today with hope for future; we salute and actively support with funds and goods those proud individuals who serve as “boots on the ground” to protect the apes; we honor any and all who strive to be responsible stewards of nature.