We are on the verge of forcing the world’s wild mammals to extinction

You’re probably aware of the deplorable trade in wildlife that’s driving many mammal species to extinction. Rhino horns for Chinese traditional medicine, elephant ivory for ornaments, or monkeys as exotic pets.


But the biggest threat to these mammals isn’t human greed for rare objects. It’s simple hunger.
That’s the finding of a study by William Ripple of Oregon State University and colleagues in the UK, Australia, Sweden, Brazil, and South Africa, just published in Royal Society Open Science.
 The researchers collected and synthesized what are often patchy data sets on the health of mammal species around the world. Of the 1169 mammal species that are threatened with extinction, they found that 301—more than a quarter—are threatened primarily by human hunting. And in most cases, it’s for their meat (though some are hunted for more than one reason).
Those 301 mammal species include 126 species of primates, 65 species of ungulates (deer, antelope, and the like), 27 species of bats, 26 species of marsupials, 21 species of rodents, and 21 carnivores (tiger, cheetah, and the like). All of these species live in poor countries, where basic shortages of protein push people into hunting them.

Losing these species can have a cascade of effects. Many of them perform crucial ecological functions, such as dispersing seeds, consuming overgrown vegetation, maintaining soils, and preying upon other species to keep ecosystems in balance.

There’s also the risk that by coming into contact with these species or eating them, humans could catch diseases. Past pandemics, such as black death, Spanish flu, and AIDS were all zoonotic diseases (ones that jump from animals to humans), and so too, most likely, will be the next big one.

It’s hard to be sure just how much wild meat gets consumed each year. Estimates include some 89,000 metric tons of wild meat harvested in the Brazilian Amazon and more than a million metric tons harvested across Africa. What’s clear is that tens of millions of people depend on wild mammals for food.