No conservation silver lining to Ebola

In August 2014, the United Nations health authority declared the Ebola epidemic centered on Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea an “international public health emergency” (WHO 2014). By October, public commentaries were omnipresent in print and online, including several statements in the mass media by wildlife conservationists. Their comments raise a number of uncomfortable issues about the consumption and trade of bushmeat in the region and in Africa more broadly that merit unpacking and rebuttal. The Ebola epidemic should not, in our view, be used as a Trojan horse to achieve wildlife conservation ends. This is both because some of the proposed conservation measures are of questionable efficacy, and may even backfire, and because doing so raises unfortunate associations with the long history of an outdated discourse of conservation in Africa that favored wildlife over people. The most prominent conservation-oriented response was the argument that clamping down on the consumption of and trade in wild animals (especially bats and primates) by Africans may be the key to preventing such epidemics (e.g., Williams 2014; Osofsky 2014; Young 2014). Jeffrey Stern implied in Vanity Fair that preventing deforestation would help retain “the buffer separating humans from animals and from the pathogens that animals harbour.” He argued that deforestation had driven bats in particular to rely on plantations rather than (disappearing) natural food sources for sustenance (Stern 2014; Young 2014). Setting aside important arguments about values, not to mention the magnitude of the “protein gap” in many tropical regions (Fa et al. 2003), the practicality of stopping people from eating bushmeat deserves comment. We are concerned that in a time of “paranoia and uncertainty” in which we are seeing “behaviours reminiscent of those