“I’M SORRY, could you repeat that figure please?” The phone line was crackly and I thought I must have misheard. Laurence Frank said it again. “Around 23,000.” That, it seems, is how many lions remain in the whole of Africa. It’s a shockingly small number. But there is worse: “It’s not just lions. Populations of all African predators are plummeting,” says Frank, a wildlife biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Twenty years ago the lion population seemed in good shape. There were no hard figures but conservationists guessed there were around 200,000. Inside parks and reserves they seemed to be thriving. What no one had noticed was that they were disappearing everywhere else, and so were other predators. Wild dogs once roamed over most of sub-Saharan Africa. Now there are between 3000 and 5500, living in a tiny fraction of their former territory. Cheetahs once ranged over most of Africa and central and western Asia: today there are fewer than 15,000. What shocks Frank most is that no one seems to realise how close to disaster these animals are. “People know about elephants, gorillas and rhinos, but they seem blissfully unaware that these large carnivores are nearing the brink.”
What has happened to send these populations of predators into free fall? The short answer is people. People with guns, spears, poison and snares. “People have always killed predators,” says Frank. “But there’s only so much damage you can do with spears and shields. Now everyone has got rifles and poisons.” The slaughter began when Europeans arrived, and a century later, Africa’s predators are in real trouble. They aren’t yet in such desperate straits as those in other parts of the world, however. “Almost everywhere else, big carnivores have had it already,” says Frank. “In Africa it’s not too late to save the situation.”
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It won’t be easy. The current strategy for conserving carnivores consists almost entirely of setting aside national parks and reserves – essentially, keeping people and predators apart. That’s no longer enough, argues Frank. If these species are to survive there must be healthy populations living outside the parks. But the world outside is increasingly hostile to carnivores, because the populations of both humans and their domestic animals are growing at an unprecedented rate. “The problem is not so much that predators kill people but that they kill livestock,” says Frank. However, after seven years studying the relationships between people, livestock and predators in the Laikipia region of central Kenya as head of the Laikipia Predator Project. Frank is convinced that peaceful coexistence is possible. What’s more, he argues, it could be achieved with little effort and minimal cost.
Wildlife parks don’t guarantee safety. Most are too small to protect genetically viable populations, and there is always a risk that disease could wipe them out. Political upheaval can also bring disaster, with hungry armies or refugees invading parks and killing the wildlife. Even during stable times, people pose a serious threat. Few reserves are large enough to contain such wide-ranging animals as lions or wild dogs, and once they step outside they become targets. With increased settlement around park borders, herders are venturing inside. According to Rosie Woodroffe, a carnivore biologist at the University of California, Davis, people cause 74 per cent of deaths among large carnivores in parks. “Protecting animals in national parks and reserves is not enough to ensure their survival,” says Woodroffe, who leads the Samburu-Laikipia Wild Dog Project (see “Return of the dogs”), an offshoot of the Predator Project. “Even if national parks are the core of conservation strategy, you can’t separate people and wildlife. They have to live together. There is no alternative.”
That’s where the Laikipia Predator Project comes in. Laikipia is a dot on the map of Africa, 10,000 square kilometres of semi-arid bush country. Some of the land is ranched commercially and some provides communal grazing for traditional Masai pastoralists. It suffers what Frank calls “the full catastrophe” of livestock, with sheep, goats, cattle and camels. In many ways, the district is a microcosm of the sort of environment where humans and predators should coexist. But there is one major difference: Laikipia still has large carnivores, whereas almost everywhere else that people raise livestock the carnivores are dead. “Laikipia is an ideal laboratory to study what goes on between predators and livestock and people and predators, and work out ways to reduce the conflict between them,” says Frank. He and his sponsors, the Wildlife Conservation Society, hope that lessons learned here will be applied in other parts of the continent, allowing predators to recolonise their old haunts.
How to save a lion
Even in Laikipia, lions have disappeared from the communal lands. But on the commercial ranches, the story is very different. Most ranchers actively encourage wildlife, keen to see an increase in the number of ecotourists visiting the area. They stock the land lightly, leaving enough grazing for wild herbivores, and most are reluctant to kill predators unless they have to. As a result, Laikipia is the only place in Kenya where wildlife is increasing. As well as the usual variety of antelope, zebra and other game animals, it has healthy populations of predators – including between 100 and 150 lions and good numbers of cheetahs, leopards, and spotted and striped hyenas. At the end of 1998, wild dogs appeared after an absence of 20 years. Now there are at least 100 dogs.
Although ranchers in Laikipia are reluctant to kill carnivores, there is a limit to how much livestock they are prepared to lose. In the past, they shot lions on sight. Today, most put up with some losses and generally kill only “problem” animals that persist in killing livestock. The death toll varies from year to year but 30, or over 20 per cent of the lion population, is typical.
“We know very little about the basic biology of predators living in human-dominated landscapes where mortality is high,” says Frank. In the case of lions, almost all research has been done in protected areas, especially in the Serengeti, a rich, open grassland teeming with prey, where lions rarely come into conflict with humans. There, they form large prides with many females and a few males. “But the Serengeti is unique and what happens there doesn’t apply elsewhere,” says Frank.
Laikipia may be more representative: the bush is dense, prey sparser and people a constant threat. By tracking individual lions fitted with radio collars, the team found that Laikipia’s lions live in looser groupings. Females hunt singly or in small groups of two or three. Many males don’t stick with one group of females but move between several. And there’s another difference: most of the lions are young. “Few reach old age – they simply don’t last that long,” says Frank. The high mortality must disrupt the lions’ social life and breeding, but it is too early to say how this might affect the viability of populations like these.
Frank and his team would like to know the answer, but they are more interested in finding ways to reduce the death toll. If they are to persuade livestock owners to go easy on the guns and poison it helps to know how much of a threat carnivores are to livestock. By monitoring livestock kills in Laikipia, the team found that on average, predators kill 0.8 per cent of the total cattle population and 3 per cent of sheep each year – a third of the number killed by disease. They prefer wild prey if they can get it. “I’m struck by how rarely they do kill livestock, given how comparatively easy they are to kill,” says Woodroffe.
This is little consolation to someone whose herd is hit night after night by a lion with a livestock habit. There will always be a need to remove persistent killers, but the results of the Laikipia tracking studies could help herders to target the right animals. “We know that particular individuals are worse than others, and once an individual begins to kill livestock it’s unlikely to stop,” says Woodroffe. One early finding suggests that the tendency to blame male lions is misplaced. At Laikipia, some of the worst offenders have been lone females.
But the best way to conserve carnivores is to prevent them from taking livestock in the first place, says Frank. “You can’t reduce the deaths of lions unless you reduce the deaths of livestock.” The most important finding of the Laikipia project so far is that people can reduce their losses with little effort and at low cost.
Mordecai Ogada, a postgraduate student at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya, and a member of the Laikipia team, studied how and why different predators take stock and then looked for ways to foil them. The traditional method of managing livestock in Kenya is to graze animals in the open by day, closely watched by herders, who can usually frighten off predators. The danger is greater after dark, when the livestock is corralled into a “boma” or enclosure.
The traditional boma is made from thorn bushes dragged into a ring, with a gap that can be closed off once the animals are inside. Ogada found that lions are responsible for two-thirds of the livestock kills at bomas, and almost all attacks on cattle. The approach of a lion causes cattle to stampede out of the boma, where they become easy targets. Sheep and goats are easier prey: both lions and leopards simply jump in and seize them. Hyenas are more opportunistic: they usually take small livestock left out at night or sneak in through gaps around the boma entrance.
Out of harm’s way
The best defence is a strong, dense boma made from the local thorn bush. Solid stone or wooden bomas, which have been tested in some areas, are less secure than they might seem. They prevent cattle from stampeding but are less effective at protecting sheep and goats: lions and leopards simply jump onto the top and haul out their prey. Gates made from sheet metal or flattened oil drums have been a huge success in preventing losses to hyenas in the tribal areas. Solar-powered electric fencing around sheep bomas virtually ended visits from hyenas. And cattle are less likely to stampede if a boma has more than one “room”.
Losses also drop off when livestock are guarded at night. Dogs are good at raising the alarm when a predator approaches, and a guard with a gun to fire warning shots is also a big plus. “The old methods really are effective,” says Frank. Better still, they are cheap. A night guard is paid around $30 a month: a single cow, by comparison, is worth between $300 and $400. And pastoralists who spend $10 on a solid boma gate can cut the loss of sheep and goats to zero. In any case, ranches need bomas to stop stock wandering at night and they need guards to help stop cattle theft, which is still a way of life in this part of Africa, says Frank. “The real cost of having predators on your land comes down to what they actually kill.”
Frank has calculated the price ranchers pay for tolerating predators by adding the cost of protecting livestock and the cost of any losses, and dividing by the number of predators visiting the ranch. Not surprisingly, lions are the most expensive. On average, it costs $360 a year to support one lion – the equivalent of one cow or nine sheep. At $35, spotted hyenas are cheapest: a ranch could support 10 hyenas for the price of a single cow. Leopards come in at half a cow and cheetahs about a third of a cow.
With better husbandry, these costs fall dramatically. But for some, the price is still too high. “Bullets and poison are always cheaper than good husbandry,” says Frank. This is especially true on the communal lands, where thousands of people and many thousand goats may share an area the size of a single ranch. Here, and in much of the rest of semi-arid Africa where tribal people raise livestock, the only convincing argument for letting predators live is if they earn money. “To most people these animals have no value. They are purely pests,” says Frank. “Predators must have a positive financial value in order to induce people to make the effort and spend some money to protect livestock.”
There are two ways predators can earn money for people. The first is ecotourism. Laikipia’s ranchers already benefit from tourist dollars, and the Masai herders are eager to do the same. At the moment they are at a disadvantage: the communal lands are heavily overgrazed, there’s little wildlife and no lions. But the return of wild dogs to the region offers some hope, as most have taken up residence on communal land. “The pastoralists are very keen, but they need a lot of help,” says Frank.
Even if that help is forthcoming, tourism isn’t the answer everywhere. “The market for tourism is more limited than people think,” warns Frank. People like to see wild animals against a spectacular scenic backdrop, but much bush country is dull and scrubby, and the wildlife hard to spot. The industry is fragile, too. The recent terrorist alerts have hit Kenya very hard. And tourism is never likely to be lucrative enough to protect the huge areas of habitat that species such as lions and wild dogs need.
The alternative is trophy hunting. Many people don’t like the idea, and it has been banned in Kenya for the past 25 years. Frank is a reluctant supporter – as long as hunting is properly regulated and doesn’t put predator populations at risk. “Paid hunting has brought about a huge resurgence of wildlife in South Africa and Namibia, and it is a mainstay of the economy in Tanzania, Botswana and Zimbabwe,” says Frank. Sport hunting requires the preservation of large tracts of land because it takes a large, healthy population of animals to produce a few old trophy males. It is also more robust than tourism: Zimbabwe no longer has an ecotourism industry but sport hunting is still going strong.
If conservation is to succeed, there must be a balance between the needs of the carnivores and the needs of the people. If persistent livestock killers aren’t dealt with, people will revert to shooting and poisoning predators. Trophy hunting may be unpalatable, but it is practical. “A trophy hunter will spend $30,000 to shoot a big male lion. Apparently some will pay $15,000 for a female,” says Frank. “In Laikipia you could make half a million dollars a year by shooting the problem animals that are going to be killed anyhow.” That would be enough to offset the cost of the entire local lion population for the next decade.
Return of the dogs
The African wild dog is one of the world’s rarest carnivores, extinct in most of its former range. Despite recent efforts to conserve it, most of the deaths, even inside parks, are still caused by people, says Rosie Woodroffe, an expert on the species. The dogs now number somewhere between 3000 and 5500 and are declining almost everywhere.
The one bright spot is Laikipia in Kenya, where Woodroffe heads the Samburu-Laikipia Wild Dog Project. Wild dogs were eradicated in the district 20 years ago. In December 1998, Woodroffe heard reports of wild dogs moving in from Samburu to the north-east. By 2000, some dogs had settled in Laikipia and made dens. Now there are at least eight packs and more than 100 dogs. “This is amazing. In 1997 there were only six populations of this size known in the whole of Africa, mostly in southern Africa,” she says. “These northern dogs are genetically distinct, which makes them a very important population.”
Wild dogs are a big draw to tourists. At Laikipia they have mostly colonised communal land where the other top attraction, the lion, has been wiped out. The local Masai people recognise the wild dog’s potential to lure tourists away from commercial ranches and spend some time at community-owned lodges. Even so, not everyone is pleased to see wild dogs return. Although they rarely attack cattle or animals kept in bomas they will go for sheep or goats left unattended or guarded by children, and individual herders can suffer big losses, says Woodroffe. “Several dogs have been shot, one speared, one I’m not sure about – and four killed on the road,” she says.
At the moment, the best way to protect the wild dogs is by an early-warning system. Many of the dogs wear radio collars and are tracked by aircraft, so Woodroffe and her team know exactly where the packs are. If there’s a risk of an attack on livestock, the team radioes the local community liaison officer, who jumps on his motorbike and sets off to warn those in the dogs’ path.