PARIS — The traders sell an array of bushmeat: monkey carcasses, smoked anteater, even preserved porcupine.
But this isn’t a roadside market in Africa — it’s the heart of Paris, where a new study has found more than 5 tons of bushmeat slips through the city’s main airport each week.
Experts suspect similar amounts are arriving in other European hubs as well — an illegal trade that is raising concerns about diseases such as monkeypox and Ebola.
The research, the first time experts have documented how much bushmeat is smuggled into any European city, was published today in the journal Conservation Letters.
“Anecdotally, we know it does happen. . . . But it is quite surprising, the volumes that are coming through,” said Marcus Rowcliffe, a research fellow of the Zoological Society of London and one of the study’s authors.
European experts checked 29 Air France flights from Central and West Africa that landed at Paris’ Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport over a 17-day period in June 2008. Of 134 people searched, nine had bushmeat and 83 had livestock or fish.
Experts found 11 types of bushmeat, including monkeys, large rats, crocodiles, small antelopes and pangolins, or anteaters. Almost 40 percent were listed on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
