The testimony in the courtroom in Brooklyn where a woman is accused of smuggling monkey meat seems more suited for an academic conference than a criminal prosecution.

The topic under discussion yesterday was the conservation of African wildlife. “Let’s look at the bigger problem of primate decline,” a defense lawyer, Jan Rostal, said.

The witness, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer, willingly took up the issue. Richard Ruggiero explained how hunting and logging were, in that order, responsible for “catastrophic declines” in monkey populations. Monkeys were generally hunted with no. 3 shot, Mr. Ruggiero said. Some “unscrupulous” hunters poured pesticide into watering holes, returning later to collect the carcasses of animals that drank from them, he added.

Mr. Ruggiero, who worked for 15 years in Africa as a conservationist, went on to describe how the global trade in bushmeat has hurt subsistence hunters by driving prices up and monkey populations down.

“I’ve lived with pygmies so far out in the forest that if they don’t have bushmeat, they’re in trouble,” he said. “I’ve seen kids on the edge of starvation.”

It did not escape the notice of those involved just how far removed this testimony was from what is usually heard in cases involving contraband smuggled through John F. Kennedy International Airport.

During a break, Ms. Rostal described what she had heard thus far as “something out of Joseph Conrad.”

None of Mr. Ruggiero’s testimony — or that of the other six witnesses called yesterday — touched directly on the allegations at the center of the case: that a Staten Island woman, Mamie Manneh, smuggled 65 steaks of monkey meat through JFK last year after flying in from Guinea. Nonetheless, depending on how this academic overview of bushmeat and monkey conservation sits with the judge, Raymond Dearie, the indictment could be dismissed before a trial. Ms. Manneh, 38, claims that eating bushmeat has religious significance for her and that she ought to be exempt from prosecution for violating the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Judge Dearie’s decision in Ms. Manneh’s case will hinge on how important he judges the country’s interest to be in enforcing the treaty. Judge Dearie also will decide how integral bushmeat is to her religious beliefs.

So for much of yesterday afternoon, witnesses testified about the importance of monkeys to the environments in which they lived and the role trade regulations played in preventing overhunting. Because monkeys eat fruits and disperse seeds across the landscape, Mr. Ruggiero said, they help populate the land with trees and grass. Without vegetation, soil erodes and the “land isn’t good for very much else,” he said.

Another witness, questioned by an assistant United States attorney, Jonathan Green, named the diseases humans could conceivably contract from bushmeat.

Among them are ebola, yellow fever, HIV, and monkeypox, Glenda Galland, an officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified. The most alarming risk associated with bushmeat is, Dr. Galland, said, the “introduction of another virus similar to HIV.”