By Susan Milius
At a market in a warehouse, a dozen or so vendors display tables stacked with smoked meat priced from $5 to $8 per pound. Sellers cheerfully answer questions about their wares, which come from monkeys, small antelopes, and rodents such as the cane rat. Biologist Justin Brashares, who studies wild animals that are hunted for meat in Ghana, paid a visit to this market last year, not in rural Africa, but in New York City. Given that the meat was almost certainly smuggled into the United States, the market “was more open than I thought it would be,” says Brashares of the University of California, Berkeley.
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He discovered the market after falling into a conversation with a New York cab driver who had originally come from Ghana. “I was asking the cab driver about his favorite bushmeat and what he missed being here,” recalls Brashares. “He said there were certain things he missed, but he could get a lot of it in New York.”