AFRICAN INDABA

Restoring Kenya’s Squandered Heritage
By Dr Laurence Frank, Laikipia Predator Project, Kenya

Editor’s Note: Dr. Laurence Frank, from the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of California, Berkeley, has studied predators in Kenya for 37 years. He runs the Living With Lions project, working on lion conservation in Laikipia and Loitokitok Districts. He is not a big game hunter.

An edited version of this article was published in March by The Daily Nation, Nairobi – Here is Dr Frank’s original text:

Kenya has squandered its most important resource: seventy percent of our wildlife has disappeared in the last thirty years. They have been strangled in snares by the millions, to be sold as ‘nyama’ in rural and urban butcheries. Even in our national parks, many species are in serious decline due to poaching and habitat destruction on their boundaries; even the lions and other large predators which attract tourists to our parks are being speared and poisoned into extinction.

In that same thirty years, South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe have seen an immense increase in wildlife numbers, as thousands of cattle ranches have been turned back to wildlife production (sadly, much of Zimbabwe’s regained wildlife was snared after ‘land reform’). Wildlife continues to do very well in Tanzania and Botswana. What accounts for the collapse of wildlife in of Kenya while it has increased enormously in the southern countries? Human populations have grown in most countries, so that does not explain the difference.

One difference is that in those countries wildlife outside of parks has great value for sport hunting, whereas in Kenya wild animals are just a costly and expensive nuisance to the rural people who share the land with them. Kenya shut down trophy hunting in 1977, just as landowners and communities in southern Africa found that their land was worth far more when producing wildlife for high paying foreign hunters than it was for cattle. Landowners carefully manage their land to produce wild game, and carefully regulate hunting to ensure a lasting crop of trophy animals. With 250,000 square kilometers outside of parks maintained for hunting, Tanzania has more wildlife than any country in Africa and income from trophy hunting is a mainstay of the national economy. Kenya’s policy, which denies rural people any benefit from wildlife, ensures that people resent animals for destroying their crops, eating their livestock, and occasionally killing people. To a rural Kenyan, it makes absolute sense to eat the game and kill the predators, because they gain nothing from, and lose a lot to wild animals. In other countries, well managed hunting brings money and development to rural areas.

How can a country without legal hunting see its wildlife spiral into extinction? The answer is bad policy – our policy ensures that rural people resent wildlife, instead of profiting from it. This tragic state of affairs has been maintained by foreign animal rights groups which spend millions of pounds and dollars annually influencing Kenyan policy makers and the media to ensure that their destructive policies are maintained. These overseas groups apparently do not seem to care that millions of our animals strangle miserably in snares, so long as none are shot for profit. They boast to their American and British supporters that there is no hunting in Kenya, not admitting that as a result there is little wildlife left in Kenya, either. They rent mobs to demonstrate against any improvement in policy, and fill the Kenyan press with nonsensical claims that hunters want to indiscriminately slaughter game, even in national parks, and stir racial strife by claiming that hunting would benefit only “rich wazungu†rather than impoverished pastoralist communities.

In North America, Europe, and southern Africa, properly managed hunting has greatly increased wildlife populations, because people value it – no species has ever gone extinct due to sport hunting, because it is in the hunters’ interest to ensure large populations. In fact, trophy hunters want only large old males, with impressive horns, tusks or manes, animals that are no longer needed to produce offspring. Unlike bushmeat poachers, they do not take females and young, ensuring an abundance of wildlife.

In Botswana today, a very few male lions are shot every year, at a price of nearly ten million Kenya shillings each. Fully half of that fee goes to the rural community in which the lion was taken, and another quarter goes to the Wildlife Department for conservation. Five million shillings would repay a community for 400 cattle taken by lions. Or support dozens of teachers or trained nurses. In Botswana, that lion, and all the associated wildlife, are a source of immense income, to be valued and encouraged. In Kenya, that lion is only an expensive, cattle-killing nuisance, to be poisoned or speared and left to rot in the sun.

Of course, many people object that serious money brings serious corruption, and claim that Kenya could not possibly regulate hunting properly. However, the old East African Professional Hunters Association took great pride in the ethical behavior of its members, and policed itself far more rigorously than the Game Department ever could. I believe that professional ethic is still strong in Kenya, and that properly managed hunting would benefit rural communities and landowners while increasing wildlife populations. If the rest of the world can manage wildlife for conservation and rural peoples’ well-being, so can Kenya. What we do know is that the old policy, bought by foreign pressure groups, has been a disaster for our wildlife heritage.

Very well reasoned and articulated statement.

When one tries to explain this reality to a skeptic, non, or anti-hunter, they stare blank faced like the person has three heads. Or they retort with illogical and poorly reasoned arguments. Why is that? Could it be that the anti movement is intellectually disingenuous?

Finaly someone making good sense.

This is the message that we need to get out to everyone. Couldn't have been any better said.

Great read.

Following Kenya's lead on wildlife conservation (as in the proposal on the ivory ban) is like following Zimbabwe's lead on economic policy.

I very good friend of mine hunted Kenya in 1968 and raved about the country, the animals and the people. After hunting Uganda in 1970, he went back to Kenya in I believe 1975, and could not believe the difference in just seven years. Game animals are a self-replenishing natural resource and can bring much needed $$ to a country. Ranchers here in California have recognized this with our wild pig population and many are no longer running cattle but use hunting as revenue. In fact the same friend who hunted Kenya, has a 7000 acre cattle ranch in S.monterey county. Last year he went into the wild pig hunting business full time. He generated $ 110,000.00 in one year on the pig hunts. In 2005, he made $ 70,000.00 on his cattle operation. He swears by the hunting operation now as in his words, " I do not have to feed or medically maintain the pigs. My hunters harvest about 30 % of the yearly birth rate and the pigs are such prolific breeders I could actually harvest 40-50 more each year and not hurt the future hunting.

Paul c

Finally someone that makes sense. Give the man a Nobel prize!

Dr. Frank out of the University of California, Berzerkly, amazing. His fellows must be having conniptions as he must be the only one who's using his kanoodle and is obviously not swayed by Liberal/Left politics and opinions.

I say that the article is worthy of publishing in all of the outdoor/hunting magazines. We need to get it to Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, African Hunter Magazine, Safari Magazine, etc. etc. etc. Can someone help do that?

quote:

Originally posted by Use Enough Gun:
I say that the article is worthy of publishing in all of the outdoor/hunting magazines. We need to get it to Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, African Hunter Magazine, Safari Magazine, etc. etc. etc. Can someone help do that?

Time, Newsweek, The NY Times, London Times, ... etc. Maybe a letter signed by a couple of thousand AR members ala Cewe's Cites post would get it somewhere.

S.