A Customs lawyer's encounter with the bushmeat trade
A guest article by Angelo Basu
Nearly 100 tonnes of illegal meat, including pork, lamb, beef, and chicken, were seized at the Port of Dover in 2024 - a 75% increase from the previous year. The surge in illegal meat imports is puzzling, especially given the affordability of UK supermarkets. A GB News investigation revealed that most confiscated meat came from regions affected by African Swine Fever, often referred to as "bush meat" from Africa. This is a common feature of African migration, but an unstudied one.
When Angelo Basu, a Twitter mutual, replied to a tweet of mine on bushmeat saying he remembered dealing with cases as a Junior Barrister in Customs some 30 years ago, I asked him to write a guest article on his experiences. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.
This week, prompted unusually by this tweet (and video below), I experienced my own version of Proust’s madeleines—only instead of nostalgia, the memory it unlocked was one of visceral disgust at smells from nearly 30 years ago.
Back then I was a young barrister working on prosecutions for Customs. That covered a wide range of things, many of which were pretty unpleasant. At least once a week there would be some poor soul flying in from the Caribbean or South America who combined terror and relief when they got stopped by Customs at Heathrow with a belly or behind stuffed with condoms full of drugs. Terror at being caught, relief because someone who cared would be ready to get a doctor if the condoms exploded rather than let them die. My Customs officer clients were then given the unenviable duty of supervising them to sit on a toilet with a glass U-bend and opening a hatch to fish out what passed to use as evidence.
Nothing, however - even the most unpleasant of the obscene materials importation cases in the pre-internet and pre-AI porn era - elicited quite the disgust of the bushmeat importation cases. Bushmeat is technically a general term for the meat of wild animals - primates, antelopes, rodents, bats, and birds – from West and Central Africa, but it also includes wild animal meat from elsewhere in the world. With regularity, someone would be stopped at an airport every few weeks, blithely trying to walk through ‘Nothing to Declare’ while stinking to high heavens of rotting meat.
I was fortunate not to have to be the one to open the suitcases, raid the high street shops selling it or, in one case, tear out the lining of a coat which concealed a putrefying corpse of a baby monkey. The normally bland, deathless prose of Customs and Police officers’ witness statements became strong enough to make those case files stink like nothing else. It is a smell most of us cannot begin to imagine; think of an ordinary English market around packing up time on the hottest day of summer – the closest most of us will come to the stench of rotting flesh – but multiplied exponentially; it was enough to make experienced Customs officers long for the simple pleasure of rummaging through a drug mule’s excrement for a condom full of cocaine.
After the task of reading and digesting the case files came the prosecutions. In most of my cases, the defendants were generally resigned to having their contraband confiscated and rarely contested its condemnation. The items seized ranged from suitcases filled with unidentified meat that was definitely not chicken to cool bags containing half a thawed pangolin—though what happened to the other half remains a mystery. Perhaps a more organized smuggler, equipped with a better chiller and more ice, managed to get it onto a dinner table in Willesden. And who knows what the number of baby monkeys we never found was?
Condemnation was the charming Customs terminology for destruction. I once got told off for suggesting that the exceptionally cheap staff bar at Dover might be selling bootlegged booze diverted from condemnation. In one instance however, the bushmeat smuggler was bringing home “delicacies” to sell in his shop and he contested the confiscation and pleaded not guilty to the importation charge. Sadly, his counsel spared the magistrates the always-enjoyable task of hearing the investigating officers flatly intone the grotesques captured in their notebooks and witness statements. Instead he defended his actions in Court without challenging them, ending his evidence with an exasperated “but it’s just food, my customers like it!”. He was given a community order (and a food safety inspection of his shop). The judicial system - then and now - is not nuanced enough in its sentencing powers to have had that community sentence involve educating his clientele about why buying and eating bushmeat was actually not a good thing to do.
As my inverse Proustian rush shows, importation of bushmeat is not a new phenomenon, but it is likely to be a growing one in the UK and other countries which have had increasing levels of immigration from outside Europe; particularly if we eschew the technical definition and include wild animal imports from other places in the world like Asia and South America. I would imagine, and unfortunately in writing this have just imagined, that there is little difference in how objectionable a slowly defrosting Chinese pangolin smells compared to a bag of Venezuelan capybara giblets or the head of a Congolese red colobus monkey.
There is of course nothing wrong with longing for the tastes of home when living in another country. I know I am not the only British tourist who is occasionally tempted by the offer of a Full English breakfast when on holiday in Spain, even if I would normally happily enjoy churros and a good strong cup of coffee, or whose heart leaps a little in the supermarket at a French ski resort at seeing a tin of massively overpriced Heinz beans (even if I actually go and buy the fresh baguette I’d come in for). I remember as a child in the 70s and 80s my parents making long trips to Drummond Street near Euston in London because the shopkeeper had phoned them up to say he had in some frozen Hilsa fish which they, as Bengali immigrants, missed. More than the shift from aubergines being considered exotic or Delia Smith cooking with cumin and fenugreek instead of generic “curry powder,” the moment that truly signaled a change in attitudes toward my parents' food came from an unexpected source. It was when Norma Major—quintessentially English and, in the popular imagination, rather traditional and unadventurous—mentioned in an interview that she genuinely enjoyed eating Hilsa.
Maybe my visceral disgust at bushmeat will in years to come be seen as outdated as the idea that getting the spices for a curry inevitably had to involve a trip to one of about three streets in London - regardless of where you lived in the country. Maybe there will become a legitimate export trade from the Congo Basin for one of the 28 million bay duikers eaten there annually. Maybe it will be a common part of any barbecue. After all, eating pheasants or deer that was shot in the wild here is perfectly acceptable and indeed pretty high status, even if game by definition is somewhat stinkier than farmed meat.
But I don’t think so. Environmentalist have for decades tried to persuade us of the merits of eating insects. We still resist (turning a blind eye to what the red food colouring carmine is made of – pretend you didn’t see this if you have fond memories of pink custard at school). In the 80s, the TV show Tomorrow’s World made and ate an omelette with earthworms as a suggestion for an abundant source of alternative protein. Yet, when a few years ago, horse meat was found in ready meals, the reaction of disgust remained - despite a large population of immigrants from France. One must also consider the zoonotic diseases - such as Ebola, HIV and SARS - that may be carried, which now present ‘a major threat to global public health.’ As many of the wild animals unfortunate enough to get smuggled to Western countries are also endangered species, the evolution of tastes and acceptability to the broader population should hopefully never take off for bushmeat, regardless of the level of immigration from countries where eating it is common.