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Kenyan bushmeat passed off as beef, officials say

In a small meat shop along a dusty alley in the Kawangware slum in Nairobi, the flies are buzzing and regularly settling on the pieces of meat laid out in the shop window.

The smell of meat in the hot afternoon is almost overwhelming. A refrigerator is nowhere to be seen. A Congolese pop song blares from cracked loudspeakers.

There is a steady flow of customers. All believe they are buying beef or mutton, which are the only types of meat the shop advertises.

But recent studies show that the meat they put in their bags might as well be from illegally killed wild animals -- so-called bushmeat.

Most Kenyans are quite conservative about their meat consumption. They prefer beef, mutton, sometimes pork.

"The butchers say it is a cow and where it came from, but we can't trust them. We just have to buy it. I hope they're not giving us bushmeat. We can't eat wild animals," says Josephine, a slum resident who often buys her meat from the shop.

A recent report from the Born Free Foundation says there is "compelling evidence that customers to many Nairobi butchers shops are being sold bushmeat."

According to the report, nearly half the meat bought in 202 butcheries around Nairobi as part of a survey was either partly or entirely bushmeat. Buyers were told they were getting beef or goat.

"The African bushmeat trade is huge. Tonnes of wild animal meat [are] trucked into the urban centers, and a good deal is shipped to other African countries and to other continents" famed primatologist Jane Goodall told the Smithsonian Magazine in their last issue.

In many West and Central African countries bushmeat, and particularly that from primates, is considered a delicacy. But in Kenya, the main reason for the increase is believed to be the lower cost. Bushmeat is cheaper than meat from farmed animals, as it is easy to hunt, and there is no expensive supply chain.

Experts say bushmeat is often mixed with meat from farmed animals, and some butchers in the slums, although denying selling bushmeat, admit it is possible to buy it from the meat traders.

Among the animals sold as bushmeat are zebra, giraffe, wildebeest, eland, topi and gazelle.

One meat shop owner in the slum says although beef meat has a stamp from a veterinarian, the friends of the butchers have fake stamps that they put on bushmeat.
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