NO WAY BACK!

A couple of years back near the border between Nigeria and Cameroon, a man describing himself as a trader walked into a mission station with a baby gorilla tied at the ankle. He spoke to a young missionary working their with his family.
On an impulse, fearing that the animal would end up as bushmeat, the missionary took in the little two-year-old female, and for a short time it become a member of his family. The missionary takes up the story in his own words:

 "Nyango stayed with us for two months. Very rapidly she made herself at home playing with my children and becoming a dear member of our family.
And while she never really ate with a spoon and fork, she did manage to sneak food away from the table and took bananas freely from the bundles we hung on the back porch.

As you Can imagine,

it was very intense to live so closely with a creature who on the other hand remained a wild animal (we had plenty of bruises from her bites to prove that) while at the same time was so 'human' that it was difficult sometimes to determine which was more accurate. In the end we decided that she was definitely a gorilla but came to realise that gorillas are the closest mirror to human behaviour that we will ever know"

Nyango was eventually taken to the Limbe Wildlife Centre in Cameroon, where she was very well looked after by professionals. She is important because she is one of a small number of Cross River gorillas, a unique species found only in small groups in the mountainous area forming the border between Nigeria and Cameroon. Conversation estimate that there may be only about three hundred Cross River gorillas remaining in the wild.
Until recently, before the government took action to save them, they were predicting they would soon be extinct. And when a species become extinct, there is no way to bring it back. The most famous example of extinction caused by man is the dodo, a flightless bird that lived in Mauritius and died out in about 1800. When humans settled the Island they brought both pigs and monkeys with them, which destroyed the dodo eggs. The settlers contributed by slaughtering thousand of these defenceless birds for meat.

The Cross River gorilla is not the only animal in Africa facing extinction. Elephant, too, are threatened.
Nigeria, example, has only few hundred forest elephant remaining; and both the black and white rhinoceros are declining in East and Southern Africa.

Other countries and continent have endangered animals too. In China the panda, a bear that can only live in bomboo forest, is threatened; and in India the tiger has been losing the battle ground against hunters who were killing it in order to sell its body parts for 'medicine'.

Extinction is a natural process. As a result the earth's climate and food supplies change, some species cannot adapt, and they die out. New species take the places of the extinct ones. Over the earth's history, extinction has occurred slowly. In the early life if the earth, when dinosaur began to die out, the rate of extinction was only one species every thousand years.

However, in the last 300 years the human population has increased very quickly. Consequently, the rates of extinction for other species have also increased. In fact, the extinction rate has increased by more than 1,000 times since modern humans showed up.