From spears to automatic rifles: The shift in hunting techniques as a mammal depletion driver during the Angolan civil war

Access to sophisticated hunting strategies increases in some political and economic contexts, such as during civil war episodes in Angola (Central Africa) in which there was a widespread distribution of automatic rifles to citizens. This facility favours the local people to slaughter larger animals, mainly during conflict gaps and in the post-war period. Herein, we conducted interviews with hunters to identify the hunting techniques used before, during and after the Angolan civil war in two different landscapes savannah and forest. We collected information on techniques used by the hunter to approach, pursue and capture game species. Through a network approach and regression models we found that rifles introduced by the Angolan civil war magnify the spectrum of species caught from small-bodied to large-bodied species, and might induce a mammalian population abundance erosion. We also found a clear species-specific conjunct of hunting techniques, valuing the cost benefit of each approach. The usage frequency of rifles was also higher in the savannah than in the forest. We reveal that changes over time for prey approximation and persecution techniques, which are possibly guided to attend the animal trade chain. Finally, these hunting technique changes has resulted in the predominance of individual hunting events with relatively low bushmeat shared between hunters, indicating a hunting pattern that contrasts with the historical hunting strategy based on collective expeditions. We can conclude that the shift in hunting techniques arising from the Angolan civil war induced a body-mediated decline in mammal diversity, causing their overwhelming annihilation.