Middle East & Africa | Kenya's lions
Sad for Simba
The fight to save the big cat is on
Jan 26th 2013 | NAIROBI
IN THE dark the safest way to attack the lions was to catch them in the headlights of a car and run them over. Once the adults were downed it was easy enough to dispatch the cubs with spears and arrows. When the killing stopped last year in Kitengela, on the plains outside Nairobi National Park, six lions were dead. It was the worst such incident in recent memory.
Killing lions without a licence is a criminal offence in Kenya and the slaughter was witnessed by a trio of park rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service. Outnumbered, they decided not to try to stop what one of them described as "mob justice" by locals angry that their goats had been eaten. Seven months later no one has been arrested. Whereas elephant and rhino poachers often end up dead or in jail, no lion killer in Kenya has ever ended up behind bars.
Conservationists' attention worldwide has been captured lately by a lethal resurgence of the trade in rhino horn and ivory, but Africa's lions, fewer than elephants and perhaps than rhinos, are in equal peril. Recent estimates put their number in Africa at 15,000-25,000. LionAid, a conservation group based in Britain, says it knows of only 645 still in west and central Africa.
Paula Kahumbu of Kenya-based Wildlife Direct says their fate Africa-wide will be decided in Kenya, home to one in ten of the surviving beasts. Kenya is losing about 100 every year, its wildlife service estimates, most of them killed by herders whose cattle graze the land where lions hunt. Cheap pesticides, such as Carbofuran, which is tasteless and odourless, have replaced spears as the chief killer. Kenya's human population, up from 8m at independence in 1964 to 42m-plus today, has deprived the lions of habitat and prey.
Laurence Frank, who runs Living With Lions, a Kenyan charity, says that the big cats are viewed as an expensive nuisance by rural people who see few benefits from tourism. "Quite rationally they have snared and eaten the antelope and poisoned the predators," he says. But it would make economic sense to stop the cull. A study by the University of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History estimates that lions on average kill livestock worth $270 a year but bring in $17,000 from tourists.
Compensating owners for livestock lost to lions may have reduced locals' incentive to look after their herds. Paul Mbugua of the Kenyan Wildlife Service suspects that last year's Kitengela killings were meant to send a message that the local Masai wanted bigger compensation.
Paying them to guard the lions has worked better. Richard Turere, a teenage herder on the outskirts of Kenya's capital, stopped lion attacks by rigging up a car battery to some torch lights to create a flashing warning. This cheap idea worked so well that he has been invited to speak in California alongside Bono, an Irish pop star turned philanthropist.
Most successful of all has been the sprouting of private conservancies turning ranches into wildlife havens that earn their keep from tourists as well as farming, and recycle the income into local communities better than national parks do. Several such ventures in Laikipia, a plateau north-west of Mount Kenya, are reversing the downward trend in lion numbers.
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "Sad for Simba"
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