Month: September 2010

Trampling the Election

Trampling the Election

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Running to the right, unstoppable campaign!
The human/elephant conflict is becoming a major campaign issue in both Kenya and Tanzania. Soon, efforts towards resolution will lose out to the calls for culling.

Western wildlife NGOs and local researchers have been working tirelessly on human/elephant conflicts over the past decade. They haven’t gotten very far. It’s hard to keep six tons from doing what it wants.

Tanzania elections are scheduled for the end of the year and new elections in Kenya for the new branches of its legislature will occur next year. One leading candidate in northern Tanzania, Abdilah Ali Warsama, campaigned this weekend on ending elephant harassment of local farms.

He’s not calling on the government to cull elephant… yet. Right now he’s just demanding compensation to the farmers and second, elephant fences.

I’ve never heard of elephant fences.

What Warsama may actually mean is the extremely expensive trenching or construction of deep moats which in several places in East Africa seems to have worked.

I saw a successful trench for myself at the southern end of Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park in the Ishasha last month. It’s a temporary solution, because the earthen moat erodes with time. But this particular 2-meter deep and 2.5-meter wide trench was working and going into its second year.

The problem with trenches is that their goal is to stop wildlife from moving beyond the trench.

Wildlife purists don’t like that. In Warsama’s constituency (the Tanzanian town of Makuyuni, in between Lake Manyara and Tarangire national parks) the African Wildlife Foundation wants to create a corridor for elephants between Manyara and Tarangire.

No successful trench would allow that.

Nothing else has worked: not pepper spray, electric fences or lead-in corridors that try to direct animals away from human habitations.

Tarangire has long been known as a prime elephant park. One of its current attractions – developed only in the last couple years – are congregations of a dozen or more huge bulls hanging around together near park roads as if modeling for tourists.

Normally this many bulls would’t hang out together.

But they’re resting and enjoying the fruits of a night of hawkish delight. These jumbos move out of the park regularly at night to raid nearby farms. Then, lounging in the protection of tourist cameras, they convene just inside the boundaries during the day.

Wasarama is not happy with Tarangire’s new attraction. He pointed out that 250 acres of his constituency’s food crops have been destroyed in the last season, and that four farmers were killed trying to defend their crops.

I don’t doubt it. Last March as my migration safari was zooming along the Tarangire / Makuyuni road at about 80 kmh, we watched a farmer using a huge bola single-handedly as he tried to chase a family of five elephant out of his corn crop.

Wasarama’s campaign issue in Makuyuni is by no means isolated. Similar situations exist outside Bwindi in Uganda and the Aberdare in Kenya.

I see the day coming soon when the human/elephant conflict gets so serious that culling and contained reserves using trenches is the only solution. It’s hard to imagine an alternative.

Too Big for Africa?

Too Big for Africa?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Will there be no American jets over Africa?
Big Guy against Small Fry. Boeing against Kenya Airways. Heard this story before? But that’s America’s problem: looking only at the short-term.

Last week Boeing stiffed Kenya Airways. Should KQ stiff Boeing back?

Probably one of the most successful companies in Africa, Kenya Airways is ruling that continent’s skies right now, and into the far foreseeable future. It is Kenya’s – indeed, East Africa’s – largest company. Its story is awesome: in a mere decade from a no-nothing local airline to a major carrier:

Its list of awards and accolades stretches from the Economist magazine to Warren Buffet. The two that stand out in my mind are Travel News & Leisure’s designation of KQ as the “African Airline of Preference”, and the 2009 global Aviation & Allied Business Individual Achievement award to its CEO, Titus Naikiuni, a home-grown Kenyan. (That award was notable because it was the first time in its history that the African organization gave such a prestigious award to any airline company other than South African Airways.)

Currently, KQ is listed as a 4-star business class airline by Skytrax which is widely used by commercial flyers for airline comparisons. American and United airlines are currently rated as 3-star, KLM and Brussels (which compete with KQ into Kenya) are rated as 3-star, and KQ shares its 4-star business class status with British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Emirates.

(Qatar is the only 5-star airline that flies into Nairobi.)

But KQ is small, still, albeit growing by leaps and bounds. So of the 886 orders for Boeing Dreamliner 787s, KQ had only 5 orders with 4 options.

As I’m sure you’ve heard Boeing has delayed for the third time the launch of its 787. This has disrupted the KQ business plan enormously.

So KQ wants some compensation in the form of a renegotiated sales price. This is standard. American Airlines which is ordering 42 had no trouble renegotiating. But to KQ, Boeing said: take a hike.

This is stupid. American industry is simply too big. It’s so big that it can’t see the future. It looks only at the present, and usually, only at other big things.

One day, certainly in my childrens’ life times, KQ will be bigger than American Airlines. But 50 years is just too far too look.

Boeing is cutting off its nose to spite its face. KQ is one of the very few airlines left on the African continent that uses Boeing instead of Airbus. Its partners and part owners, KLM and Delta, are almost exclusively Airbus. It makes double sense, now, for KQ to stiff Boeing and move to Airbus.

And if that happens, it won’t be KQ that suffers. It will be Boeing. Maybe not in the next decade, but with some luck, the world may last longer than that.

California Wildlife Management

California Wildlife Management

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Wednesday early morning police (it took three of them) shot (multiple times) and killed a mountain lion found in a residential area of Berkeley, California.

A 90-pound mountain lion (also known as a cougar) is roughly the same size as a cheetah, although stronger. The cheetah is built for speed whereas the cougar is built to bring down a deer, one of its staple foods.

The cougar population in California has been stable and healthy over the last decade, and there are growing calls to allow sports hunting, although Proposition 117 (passed in 1990) designated cougar as a “specially protected species.”

Not too successfully so Tuesday night.

The 911 call went out at 2:23a. Police called emergency California Fish & Wildlife officials, but they were hours away. The three police chased the cat through numerous backyards finally cornering it.

When asked why a wild cougar would find itself so far from a reserve, police admitted that the animal might have been a “pet.”

Alert. Alert. All 90-pound labs, rots, mastiffs, Shetlands, large boas and all Danes, stay inside your house! I’ve been working on my cat, Hillary, but she’s headed in that direction, too.

The public reaction has been mostly negative, based on the comments left on the San Francisco Chronicle story as well as several local blogs. Much of the criticism is exaggerated, although I personally think the police reaction was unnecessary.

The determination that the cat posed a “real and present danger” is hard to support. There are fewer than a dozen attacks by cougars every year, continent-wide. And the claim that professional wildlife officials were too far away to help… well, do the police know of that little institution known as the University of California – Berkeley? Not sure, but I think they do some zoology there.

Compare this to a much more dire situation in East Africa, where real lions, 4 to 5 times as big, are becoming an increasing concern to growing urban populations. Where up to ten people per year are now killed by them in East Africa.

Predator/human conflicts are not considered an American problem. Thank goodness, because this is certainly not the right solution.