Friggin rebels

I predict that only humans and viruses will survive the 21st Century.

There must be oil there somewhere.

and what result would discovering and developing oil in this region have?

I also dont think that your take, Dadpad, comes any close to "the REAL reason things like this happen" than what the others were sighing. Do you really think its out of hunger that the rebels killed the gorillas?

Perhaps you should re-read one of those stories about the hippos that you mention. Its not hunger that drives the rebels to slaughter the hippos, in any case.

In a frenzied slaughter earlier this month, Congolese rebels shot several hundred hippos on the south-western shore of Lake Edward in Virunga national park, halving an already decimated population. Less than two decades ago, conservationists counted 22,875 hippos in the park, most of them in and around the lake. But an aerial count last week showed that what was once the world's most important hippo stock had been reduced to 315 animals. [..]

Shortly before midday a fortnight ago, four motorised pirogues approached Vitshumbi, a fishing village on the southwestern shore of the lake. Each carried about 20 Mai Mai men armed with AK-47s. They told the worried villagers that they had not come to attack them but rather the hippos, which are valued for their meat and the ivory found in their long canine teeth. As the pirogues chugged from one pod of animals to the next the water boiled red.

"Ah Papa, it was terrible," said Fernand Kawembe, the head of police in Vitshumbi. "They were shooting all day."

The dead hippos were dragged to the shallows, hacked into large chunks and loaded into a second of fleet of pirogues. By nightfall, 74 hippos had been killed, according to Mr Kawembe. There was so much hippo meat, described by locals as a cross between pork and beef, for sale in the lakeside villages that the price had sunk to under 10p a kilogram, less than a 10th of the cost of goat meat.