The bushmeat trade kills millions of primates annually across Central and West Africa, with orphaned infants experiencing severe welfare trauma and posing complex rehabilitation challenges.
Bushmeat hunting creates a cascade of welfare harms: adult primates are killed through often non-instant methods, and infants that witness their mothers killed then experience the severe trauma of capture, confinement, and prolonged isolation from conspecifics. Research on primate psychology documents that these early trauma experiences cause lasting behavioral and neurological changes analogous to PTSD in humans. Sanctuaries provide critical welfare intervention but face chronic underfunding relative to the scale of the crisis. Addressing bushmeat hunting requires simultaneously providing food security alternatives for hunting communities and law enforcement against commercial-scale operations.