Category: Wildlife Management

On Safari: Dead Elephant Walking

On Safari: Dead Elephant Walking

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Chobe’s elephants are legendary, but what I saw this time is disconcerting. They are tame, inbred, their many broken tusks are like toothpicks, their family behaviors have broken down and they are destroying the Chobe forests. Is it time to cull?

There is a growing consensus in the affirmative. Even the conservation organization Elephants Without Borders, which can hardly be blamed for skirting the issues of culling, has come round to accepting it at least when human tragedies are caused.

These ‘problem elephants’ should be culled, according to a September, 2007, white paper written by EWB researcher, Dr. Michael Chase. Chase’s argument at that time was that a culled elephant would discourage other elephants from repeating the offense.

But that has proved untrue. And elephants causing injuring a person or destroying a small farm is hardly the major problem; it’s simply the one that gets the most attention. It’s the easiest to understand.

But there are far more serious consequences of too many elephant. It starts with the elephant itself. And the problem isn’t and wasn’t the elephant; it’s us.

Today we watched spectacular displays of multitudes of elephants in Chobe, playing in the water (actually swimming!), young adolescents sparring harmlessly, and at least three newborns just discovering the world. How can we not but simply sit back and enjoy this?

Chobe's toothpick elephants.
Because when looking a little closer, the scene ain’t so cute. It’s absolutely remarkable how many of Chobe’s elephants have broken tusks, an obvious reflection that if not eating themselves out of house-and-home, they’re at least so far eating themselves out of calcium.

And the tusks which remain are pitiful. We know that smaller tusked elephants throughout the continent are a result of the years of cataclysmic poaching in the 1970s and 1980s, when “small tusks” become a survival mechanism. Only big-tusked elephants were wanted by the poachers.

But large, healthy tusks are essential to a sustainable elephant population, which uses them for all sorts of things, like digging for salt and in dry times, water. So throughout the rest of Africa we’ve seen the slow improvement in the size of tusks.

But not in Chobe. Quite the reverse, and whatever makes for strong, healthy tusks is now jeopardized.

And then there’s the elephant’s important family behavior. Males that reach puberty are kicked out of the family unit. Females remain with the unit forever with their children, and a grand matriarch leads the family. In Chobe, that seems to have disappeared almost altogether, simply because there are so many elephant they can’t separate themselves into any type of grouping.

I hesitate to quote numbers, because elephant population studies are notoriously wrong, skewed by the bias of the organization making them, and official government conservation numbers can be even worse.

Moreover, elephant are difficult to count, because they travel such enormous distances so quickly and do not necessarily repeat travel routes. But suffice it to say there are lots of elephant in northern Botswana and similar habitats in surrounding Zambia, Angola and Namibia.

I have been visiting Chobe since 1978. Hardly is my analysis scientific, but my photos speak volumes. Most of Chobe was a forest in 1978. Today, every excursion from Kasane into the park that was once a dense forest will encounter meadows and eroded cavities with fibrous grasses.

Chobe is a resilient ecosystem, sitting along the rich river systems that eventually form the Zambezi, and in an area with relatively high rainfall. But while it may be true that ecosystem recovery is more possible here than in other places in Africa, it is clear the degradation of the ecosystem in the last 30 years has been severe.

What we can see is only the tip of the iceberg. The loss of biodiversity in grasses, trees and other plants leads to a loss of biodiversity in avifauna and much more.

Why will no organization undertake a definitive biomass study?

Because everyone knows the outcome, and no one wants to author it.

Even the official government site for Chobe National Park concedes, “Damage caused by the high numbers of elephants is rife in some areas of the Chobe National Park. In fact, concentration is so high throughout Chobe that culls have been considered, but are too controversial and have thus far been rejected.”

I think we’ll have to leave it to the younger and less prejudicial scientists yet unencumbered by worries about funding and tenure from a public obsessed with the “little bunny” syndrome. But for better or worse, young scientists taking the issue head on are concluding that culling is now not a viable option.

Benjamin Golas of the 2013 class of graduates of the University of Pennsylvania veterinarian school is one of them. He writes about Chobe:

“Too many elephants…”

“I would hardly be a good conservationist if I did not bring up [the fact that] the region, which can happily and sustainably hold a few thousand pachyderms, is home to upwards of an estimated 140,000… and it shows.

“Trees become scarce… Baobab that remain… look sick and scarred.”

Golas sees the most terrible situation looming. He believes that we have avoided culling for so long that now “the sheer numbers of elephants have made responsible culling impracticable” and there is no viable alternative.

No viable alternative? So then, what?

Perhaps the natural crashing of the population, a Biology 101 phenomenon that every college student learns: Left to nature’s devices, too many of one species will ultimately result in its cataclysmic decline, suddenly and often without warning.

It could be a virus that spreads like wildfire. It could be a syncing of estrus cycles caused by unusual weather. It could be a a new political shift in local human populations that just get fed up with the problem. But something will ultimately cull the elephant, now that we haven’t.

For years I espoused this position: let nature take its own course: Hand’s off. But now I see the danger of so doing, that as the elephant takes itself down, it may take much of the biomass with it.

Is it time to cull?

It’s too late.

Saving Kihansi

Saving Kihansi

by Arusha ♥ 6 Comments

Millions have been spent to save a tiny Tanzanian toad. An incredible story with an incredible bill. Is it worth it?

Needless to say it was not Tanzania that saved the toad. Tanzania had no qualms about replacing a tiny toad with a dam that now produces a sizable portion of its needed electricity.

It was supporters of the Bronx and Toledo zoos and the Wildlife Conservation Society and to me it’s one of the most exciting success stories (so far) in worldwide conservation.

But I wince at the cost, not fully revealed but capable of sour estimation.

The Kihansi Spray Toad Nectophrynoides asperginis was only discovered in Udzungwa in Tanzania in 1996. Udzungwa is one of the most magical places in East Africa, a Tanzania treasure in part because it’s so huge and inaccessible.

I’ve climbed the granite edges of one of its many, many waterfalls and there are incredible similarities to jungles around the world in terms of the density and variety of species, towering canopies and peat laden forest floors.

But quite unlike most of the world’s jungles, this is not a flat place. It’s forever mountainous and cavernous with some stupendous drops. Ergo, waterfalls.

This tiny little creature lived in the spray of one waterfall.

Really?! I think it’s premature to suggest that’s it, although most of the scientific literature says so: that’s it. Five acres. Kihansi’s world is twice the size of the little cliff on which sits my current home. But so much of Udzungwa has yet to be carefully surveyed, might there not be other Kihansi toads somewhere else?

But the scientific community mobilized in the presumption this was it. Five acres. And five acres of misty waterfall sides that would disappear when a dam was built in 1999. And all of this came to pass.

Dam for Tanzanian development. One of maybe hundreds of water falls stopped. Spray ended. WCS scientists monitored the demise of the species after the dam began functioning in 2000, and in five months the population crash was so severe, they collected nearly every last one they could find : 499.

The toads were rushed to the Bronx Zoo, bred quickly and dispersed to five zoos around the United States. Only one other zoo, the Toledo Zoo, was able to create a sustainable population.

Despite multiple scientific surveys of the area subsequently, no toad was seen in 2005, and in 2009 the IUCN officially declared the toad extinct in the wild.

Enormous science was garnered from this little thing. It’s an unusual toad, with its babies born alive, not as tadpoles. One remarkable discovery occurred when scientists desperate to save every last one performed a C-section on a dime-sized mother and learned that babies were at one stage tadpoles, only living within the body of the mother.

So the Bronx and Toledo zoos prevailed through fungus diseases, lighting problems and discoveries that America’s “pure water” would kill the creature. Soon lots of toads were being produced in two zoos.

Meanwhile back at the World Bank which produced the dam which squashed the toad which motivated this worldwide conservation effort, successful conservation lobbyist mined funds to build a gravity-run misting machine in Kihansi Gorge to recreate the original habitat conditions.

Really?!

And in mid-August this year toads were flown back to Tanzania, where they were monitored and nurtured for four months before being freed back in Kihansi Gorge in the spray of the artificial waterfall spray mahine, about ten days ago.

“I’m guessing it’s in the millions,” one of the lead scientists, Dr. Jennifer B. Pramuk, curator of herpetology at the Bronx Zoo, estimated for the New York Times the cost of just the misting machine project.

Here’s my real worry:

Machines break a lot in Africa, even simple machines, and repair isn’t simple, even simple repair. Reconstructed habitats are never what they’re intended. Imagine the global warming changes that have effected the region in the 7-10 year absence of the toads from the area.

If Kihansi truly only lives in this little 5-acre plot, man’s arrival even to “help them” could be all that’s needed to wipe them out. Forget about the dam, or global warming. Just man’s arrival and moving them unnaturally from place to place could be all that’s needed to make them extinct.

We’ll see with time. Remain vigilant, as I will be, because what happens to Kihansi will be fundamental to decisions to save other species in years to come.

Maul Special

Maul Special

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Pretty story but not very effective: recruit Maasai morani – the legendary warriors that are expert lion killers – to protect lions. Sort of like hiring the ultimate teenage hacker to protect HSBC.

Lion numbers are dropping alarmingly, and better than any other great African savannah animal lion are a true indicator of the health of the African wild.

Unlike elephant or rhino – which are being poached at alarming rates even as their wild population increases – lion are the top of a complex pyramid of life and while masters of their position are beholding to the foundations.

Many important studies have suggested unusual reasons for the decline over the last several decades, but it now seems clear that the reason is quite simple: the wild is contracting.

Of the big cats, only the solitary leopard seems capable of adapting to a world increasingly dominated by man. The others – and especially the lion – seem unable to establish any relationship with a world increasingly dominated by homo sapiens except to war with him.

And the greatest battles are those legendary pitched posses of Maasai warriors in Old Testament regalia: Maasai don’t kill any animals for fun or food. They kill in retaliation, as if a lesson can be learned.

When a lion threatens their goats or cattle Maasai go on a war path, and some of the most spectacular stories out of Maasailand are of the greatest and most noble of the lion hunts. In the old days headmen were often determined by those who successfully killed a lion.

And remember, this isn’t with a gun. It’s with a spear and a knife.

Maasai and lion have coexisted for centuries because they use the same habitat. The grazing necessary for Maasai stock is the same that all sorts of antelope on the plains need. When there was enough for all, everyone was fat and sassy. There were enough antelope for the lion that much preferred them to a smaller goat or a larger and lanky cow.

Maasai cattle were bred not for meat but for milk. The cost/benefit ratio of a lion bringing down a Maasai cow compared to a wildebeest was no contest. The wildebeest could be killed more quickly (cats kill by strangulation, and this takes enormous time with a cow) and the dinner table had lots more meat for the effort.

But times changed. And note, too, that traditional Maasai are declining just as rapidly if not more so than the wild animals in their homelands. And maybe for the same reasons:

Shopping malls, highways, schools and hospitals, modern farms.

It takes no kopjes scientist to know where this is going.

So arise the Lion Guardians! This high profile NGO in East Africa was formed by dedicated conservationists “to promote and sustain coexistence between people & wildlife through ecological monitoring and local capacity building.”

IE: Pay Maasai morani to protect rather than kill lions.

It’s noble, yes. And anything that can give paid work to young traditional Maasai who are themselves increasingly threatened, is good. Especially in the West Kilimanjaro area adjacent Amboseli National Park.

This area is a microcosm of lion difficulties everywhere. Amboseli is one of the most important and well-known big game parks in the world famous especially for its elephant. Elephant are being threatened today by increased poaching, but their numbers are still increasing in places like Amboseli, because … well, elephant get their way.

But Amboseli is surrounded by an increasingly developed agriculture, particularly just to its south in Tanzania. The highlands of Kilimanjaro are perfect for wheat and other cash crop farming.

The towns of Arusha to the west and Moshi to the east are expanding rapidly. The roads are being paved.

All of this – not just farming – needs water. This is draining the existing aquifers and Amboseli is becoming drier and drier. This is a death sentence for much game like buffalo and wildebeest. The increased elephant population results in deforestation, and combined with the loss of aquifer power the reduction of forests is terrible for impala, duiker and a chorus of tiny things like voles and mice that animals like hyaena and jackal need to survive.

So you see … or don’t, so to speak, as time passes. No traditional food, Mr. Lion heads south to where Maasai live with their goats and cattle.

Lion Guardians believes in conserving the wild and in promoting tourism. It’s a two-pronged argument that often sticks it to itself. Tourism is one thing. Conservation is another.

There’s no doubt that tourism suffers as there are fewer lions to see in the wild. But tourism is already suffering drastically, mainly from the political situation in Kenya linked directly to the violently unsettled situation in Somalia. We hope this is temporary.

Whether temporary or not, conservation is another matter.

I grow quite sad thinking the day may come when there won’t be lions in the wild as I’ve seen all my life. But it’s hard to argue to save the lion with the same powerful scientific arguments for saving the Amazon rain forest. We know almost everything possible about lions and the African savannah. There are of course mysteries yet to be revealed … but not many.

The forest provides my oxygen. The veld powers my imagination – no small thing – but not exactly biological.

And what we know mostly is that Maasai recruited to protect lions are getting mauled, and in the end, not saving any more lions and not convincing their young teen Maasai not to go to the city and become certified public accountants.

That’s life.

Animals, Plants or People?

Animals, Plants or People?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

East Africa’s hirola antelope may soon become the second antelope in 100 years to go extinct. So what?

There are 91 species of antelope left in the world, 90 of which are native to Africa. There are currently 350-450 hirola left in the wild in East Africa, down from 14,000 in the 1970s.

If hirola become extinct they would join the Bubal Hartebeest as the two antelope which went extinct in the last 100 years. An allied species, the Schomburgk’s deer, would make three.

And the extinction in all three cases is due to habitat loss, aggravated by hunting. All three would likely be survivors if man were not also competing for their territories.

In the last hundred years 12 other larger mammals (in addition to the 3 mentioned above) have gone extinct:

5 predators: 3 tigers, 1 lion and 1 wolf.
Plus 1 rhino, 1 seal, 1 ibex and 2 wallabies.

The rhino, wallabies and seal were hunted to extinction. The ibex suffered the same fate as the antelope above (habitat loss aggravated by global warming and human competition). The predators likely went extinct because the food source they depended upon diminished.

So what? This doesn’t seem like very many.

Wrong. Big mammal extinctions are the itty bitty tip of the iceberg, and you’d have to go back multiple centuries to obtain the next 12 bigger mammal extinctions. And mammals represent only a very tiny fraction of the life forms on earth.

The rate of extinctions of all life forms in the last century is massive, exponential in fact when compared to previous centuries; indeed, when compared to millennia.

So… what?

Species conservation as a social and political goal began about a 100 years ago with Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. In those early days its justification was mostly to preserve lovely things for future generations when preservation did not require considerable resources to succeed.

A half century ago preserving lovely things for future generations became trumped by the mandate to maintain as great a biodiversity on the planet as possible. The arguments for biodiversity are powerful but often complicated. They’re best summed up by a 2010 Cornell University study that essentially argued that biodiversity is a defense against the greatest threats to humankind like viruses.

Lately, though, the public isn’t buying the science. Most polls show that a very slim margin but more than 50% of Americans no longer believe there is anything wrong with extinction.

But I tend to ignore about half of America, that also disbelieves global warming and evolution. Ignorant Americans are a danger to the future, but they haven’t at least as yet deterred good science. And we can hope that in a relatively short time, good science will prevail, again.

But what about the hirola? Should Nature Conservancy and its partners conduct a fund-raising campaign that will net tens of thousands of dollars for land purchase and management, anti-poaching and veterinarian services to protect a single species of antelope in the wild?

Or, should the tens of thousands of dollars that need to be spent to do so better be used to manage the Dadaab refugee catastrophe that is very nearby?

Or, should the tens of thousands of dollars better be spent to save 100 species of plants in the Amazon?

Or, should the tens of thousands of dollars to create and maintain The Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy better be spent to actually pay for building the rerouted Serengeti Highway?

I could go on and on. Northern Kenya where the hirola exist is one of the most stressed areas on earth. The focus there should be on the Dadaab refugees first, not the hirola. And the loss of the hirola in the wild does not mean an extinction of the species, just of the species in the wild.

And the resources that seem would be required to do this job are enormous relative to hundreds of other projects to maintain the planet’s biodiversity.

Should the hirola be saved. Yes. But not at the cost of so many other possible species rescues.

No matter they might be little green vines that don’t elicit tears from rich people.

Wild Animals Aren’t Nice Anymore

Wild Animals Aren’t Nice Anymore

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Pepper spray, moats, blow horns, flashing lights … nothing seems to work. People around the world are getting fed up with wildlife.

And it’s becoming frighteningly unclear if the benefits of tourism are greater than the disadvantages that local communities now believe they must bear to support that tourism. And which is more important: agriculture or tourism? Resource development or tourism? A relaxing Sunday walk in the park, or tourism?

And as a result the greater question of biological diversity gets subsumed in this more immediate question.

Last week officials from the Kenyan Wildlife Service held town meetings in southern Kenya to admonish citizens not to try to move ton plus buffalos themselves, while in the west of the country exploding populations of wild dogs have begun to attack farmers’ sheep.

With nearly 15% Kenya’s land wilderness reserves that protect wild animals, it’s hard to find any human area short of the megalopolis of Nairobi that isn’t effected.

But it isn’t just Africa, of course. It’s worldwide. From India to Indiana. From elephants to wolves to beavers. And what’s worse is that the conflict is becoming tinier and tinier!

Two years ago Amanda H. Gilleland of the University of South Florida (USF) completed a meticulous study documenting a growing intolerance for wildlife by the citizens of southern Florida. But not just to cougars and alligators, but to armadillos, possums, racoons, squirrels and … even frogs!

More poisoning, more illegal shooting, more often cruel and unnecessary “eradication.”

Man against Beast.

What’s going on?

Two simple things: (1) increasing wildlife populations which have been unexpectedly even more increased by (2) global warming.

Obviously global warming threatens a few species like the polar bear, but for the vast majority of the planet’s mammalian biomass it’s actually a boon to survival. Wild animals adapt to changing weather much better than people do and warm is better than cold.

When elks move north from Isle Royale because it’s getting too hot for their food source, wolves are then left without a meal. So with the first warm breeze, wolves move towards their next easiest dinner: the nearby sheep farms of northern Wisconsin.

When excessive drought and flooding caused by global warming in the equatorial regions threatens the grass dinners of the African buffalo, the massive herds simply move into people’s backyards and irrigated farms.

And all of this is happening after decades of successful work to conserve wolves and buffalos, boosting their populations even without the help from Chinese factories.

It isn’t as if scientist haven’t been trying to do something. But conference after conference from my point of view seems to slam into the brick wall of the simple fact “there is too much.” There are more people. There are more animals. There are too many.

The host for the black bear/human conflict conference held this year in Missoula characterized his responsibility to sum up the gathering’s scientific findings as “the guy with the broom at the end of the parade, sweeping up the horse apples.”

“Bear managers in North America are victims of their own success,” he concluded.

It’s incredibly ironic that successful big game management, which the Kenya Wildlife Service inscribes as Kenya’s “posterity,” is a main source of the problem. Wild dog is the best example.

Nearly extirpated throughout Kenya ten years ago, a large scale project to vaccinate pet dogs that lived on the outskirts of wilderness areas essentially controlled distemper that had been migrating from those pets into the wild population. Now pets and wild dogs are distemper free, but sheep farmers have become quite ill tempered.

Of course a huge part of the problem would be easily solved if we solved global warming. (Oh, and by the way, that solution would create a few other benefits to humankind as well.)

But even if a sudden, miraculous consensus was found in the world to deal with global warming, it would take a lot longer to accomplish than some sheep farmers in Kiambu or Wausau are willing to tolerate.

Besides, it’s only half the problem. The other half of the problem is that animal populations are growing. In some cases like elephants it’s fair to say they’re exploding, and in almost all cases so are the human populations sitting next to them. “There is just so much flour you can put into a loaf of bread,” my grandmother used to say.

But not resolving the issue to at least some extent will create the defacto solution implicit in the USF study:

Wild animals won’t be considered nice, anymore.

Africa may have presented us with the solution, although it’s expensive.

First accomplished in Namibia with Etosha National Park in 1973, the 500-mile 9-foot reenforced double electrified fence with moat, successfully divided big game from ranchers, and over the last 40 years both ranching and tourism have prospered.

And more recently in Kenya, the Aberdare National Park is now fenced in. The 250-mile long fence included 100,000 posts hand driven into the ground. But it cost what amounts to the average annual wage of one million Kenyans.

There’s no alternative, folks. Some places like Tanzania’s Serengeti and Botswana’s Okavango Delta may remain mostly unfenced for another generation or two, but the day is coming. If we don’t stop the war of Man Against Beast, we know who will win.

To Poach Is/Or To Cull

To Poach Is/Or To Cull

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Is the extraordinary almost unbelievable reproductive rate of elephants in Tarangire National Park driving poaching?

Elephant researcher Charles Foley, whose principal research camp is located inside Tarangire National Park, reported this year that elephants that principally use Tarangire as their habitat are reproducing at a 7% rate.

For a large mammal that is nearly inconceivable. Reproductive rates vary in the extreme in the wild. This is principally because the reproductive rate is impacted so seriously by climate which immediately impacts food source. Wild animals tend not to breed when their normal habitat is disrupted.

And for the last several decades in Africa, “normal habitat” hardly exists except in a few well managed large reserves like Kruger in South Africa. But Kruger is famous for sustainable culling of big game, including giraffe, driven not by reproductive rates but the carrying capacity of the environment.

A stable wild animal population in a stable wild animal environment generally means that the animals which die, naturally or otherwise, are equally replaced by new births. In the Tarangire area we can speculate with some evidence that such a “stable” rate would be about 2%, not 7%.

But that population of elephants reproducing at a 7% rate isn’t growing. Why?

The short answer is poaching. There have been numerous articles recently on the increase in elephant poaching in Tanzania. See my last blog Friday for a summary.

There’s no other reasonable explanation. Tanzanian elephant management has been poor at best despite having some of the finest big game field researchers in the world. The failure lies squarely with the Tanzanian government, although it’s hard to argue their failures in wildlife management are any greater than in government across the board.

So despite many efforts to create elephant corridors that would widen dispersal of various populations (which in turn would complicate attempts to use reproductive rates for effective management) few of these corridors have been successfully implemented.

More or less the Tarangire population is contained. During the wet season a large portion of the herds move eastwards of the park. Individuals are reported traveling between Tarangire and Manyara (I’ve seen them myself on numerous occasions) but probably not in any sufficient numbers to validate dispersal theories.

A huge number of elephants are being poached.

But as I stated Friday and before, this is not a crisis that threatens the overall population, as was the case in the 1970s and 80s. In a weird and ironic way, one might postulate that poaching has become a current ecological component of a stable population.

That’s not a comfortable idea. And it doesn’t mean that poaching is good. But it does mean at least for the present that South African notions of management that aggressively embrace culling won’t work if poaching isn’t first contained.

But likewise, it means if poaching is contained, culling becomes immediately necessary.

It’s an extraordinary balancing act, and we all know that once poaching at this presumed level has become a part of a local culture, it’s near impossible to curtail. The likelihood that Tanzania could get it together in any reasonable period of time to actually limit poaching is as about as likely as finding a tiger in the Serengeti.

Poaching is not good for more reasons than breaking the specific laws against it. The sustained breaking of any laws leads to a lawless culture. The chain of sale of the ivory through the local middleman, corrupt politician and bribed cargo authority spreads anarchy through a social system. The pile of meat that’s left isn’t exactly inspected by local health officials before being dispersed through the community.

And the temper of the elephants being hunted down is exacerbated, and a calm elephant isn’t exactly a friendly beast to begin with.

So I’m not advocating allowing the status quo to continue. But I think it’s extremely important that everyone realize there are two very different sides to this management problem, and that dealing with one alone won’t work.

Poaching is no longer a separate issue from culling in Tanzania.

NPR White Elephant

NPR White Elephant

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

NPR’s reporting yesterday on elephant poaching in East Africa disappointed those of us who know East Africa and cherish its wildlife.

In addition to simple inaccuracies, my main criticism was that the two stories filed by John Burnett were grossly narrow, cherry picking scandalous components while ignoring an essential bigger picture for cheap and trivial stuff that gets quicker attention.

The increase in elephant poaching in East Africa, most severely but not exclusively in Tanzania, has been on the rise for 4-5 years. It’s not new and it’s not suddenly greater than a few months or years before.

Burnett’s lead story suggested it was something relatively new and newly urgent, and so he neatly avoided the essential and more complex history of what has actually been happening.

This is my sixteenth blog about elephant poaching since March. Simply type “elephant” in the search box to the right for those stories. Journalists from Reuters, the New York Times and AFP have filed just as many over that same period.

This is because as Burnett said poaching is increasing almost as rapidly as in the catastrophic years of the 1970s-80s when 95% of Kenya’s elephants were wiped out and nearly 60% of Tanzania’s. It has not reached that level — nowhere near that level — and many other factors are considerably different.

Let’s start with the numbers, because Burnett has some quite wrong. I tread very cautiously and with some hesitation, because the last thing I want to do is reduce concern for a very serious East African problem.

As I’ve written again and again, the “elephant problem” is central to East Africa’s wilderness and economy. Poaching is absolutely one of the most serious problems facing East African society. But we do our cause harm with untruths.

“Perhaps 70,000 to 80,000 elephants roam” Tanzania Burnett claims.

On January 15, 2011, The 5-year Tanzania Elephant Management Plan spear-headed by such prominent and widely respected researchers as Charles Foley put Tanzania’s elephant population at around 110,000.

How many elephant have actually been poached since then, augmented by a record number of births due to good rains, is hard to estimate accurately, but the overall population is certainly higher than Burnett speculates.

Burnett says that the 70-80,000 number is “perhaps a quarter” of the continent’s population (280-320,000). This is widely inaccurate. Most recent estimates are very much higher. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature puts the continent’s total number at 472-690,000.

Burnett quotes a former conservationist in Tanzania as saying that 30 elephants daily are being poached. Using a conservative estimate that each elephant killed carries at least 100 pounds in total ivory from two tusks, that would mean there was more than 500 tons of ivory poached out of Tanzania each year, and that’s ludicrous.

Shippers of the most creative sort could not conceal even a fraction of that.

These are not minor inaccuracies. The “carrying capacity” of any environment for managed big game depends on precise numbers, not widely speculated ones. Burnett’s high-balling his numbers might enhance the urgency of his report, but it distracts us from possible solutions.

I wonder if as in our politics and grocery shopping, Americans just can’t be mobilized without exaggeration. It’s a sad commentary that NPR has fallen into this trap.

Burnett’s second story was better. He interviewed a poacher.

The story demonstrates that quite unlike the 1970-80s corporate poaching with Sikorsky helicopters using everything from AK47s to bazookas and then chartered ocean liners, some of the poaching today is an individual criminal phenomenon. And like so much crime everywhere in the world, its principal motivation is poverty.

That makes it much less effective and much harder to remedy.

Burnett rightly puts the onus for poaching on Asian market demand that we all agree has been sparked by economic growth in China. The evidence for this is overwhelming. But I’m very disappointed he didn’t describe the exciting new efforts by Chinese and Chinese surrogates to change this behavior.

It means that even the villain knows he’s a villain, and that’s a real start.

Finally, Burnett totally ignored one of the essential if perhaps not the central cause of poaching, today: There are too many elephants.

There are too many elephants not just in Tanzania, but throughout Africa and even in Asia.

This fact is hard to digest. It doesn’t mean there are more elephants than there once were. But for the existing diminished habitat, and in terms of human/elephant conflict, there are simply too many.

And that’s the real problem. It means poachers often get a pass because local officials actually appreciate what they’re doing, because farms are saved and school buildings don’t have to be rebuilt so often.

You won’t hear this from an elephant researcher standing over a carcass recently poached. And you won’t get a Tanzanian official to say as much to a westerner writing an article about poaching. It takes a more cautious and deliberate reporter than Burnett.

The story of elephants, their majesty, their near decimation in the 1970-80s, and now their perplexingly big problem in rapidly developing African societies is one of the most important stories in East Africa, today. It represents almost all of East Africa’s problems and probably contains some of their solutions. It’s as much historical as contemporary.

But jigging up the story with exaggeration while neglecting central facts won’t help. It needs as much attention from Rachel Maddow as the Tea Party.

Really Wild Intervention

Really Wild Intervention

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The wild gets less wild, and we begin to manage the great African savannahs like a zoo. Is it our bleeding hearts or our brainy conclusions? Should we intervene in the wild to save big game from natural calamity?

In May and again last week, researchers in Zambia and Kenya intervened to save elephant that were mired in mud. Had they not intervened both elephants would have died. Now, both elephants are completely well.

This intervention is a seachange in the way researchers have interacted with the wild for centuries.

Rachel McRobb heading a team of The South Luangwa Conservation Society pulled an elephant from the mud in May and attracted enormous attention worldwide. The story made front pages in the London tabloids.

Writing in her own blog, McRobb conceded that “Most conservationists believe that man should not meddle with the natural order and that we should allow nature to run her course however cruel.” And without any further explanation as to why she no longer adopts the rule, she admitted, “We simply could not stand by and watch them struggle and slowly die.”

Last week in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park the exact same story:

Researchers with Cynthia Moss’ Amboseli Trust for the Elephants rescued an eight-month old calve from a deep muddy well hole after using Landrovers to chase the mother away. Landrovers and ropes were then used to rescue the juvenille and it was ultimately reuinted with its mother. Click here for the video of the event.

“We shouldn’t intervene where animals are dying of natural causes. In fact, human interference can have implications for other wildlife or ecosystem processes that rely on animal carcasses. It’s important to let wildlife be wild,” Australia’s Victoria State government natural resources ministry in Australia states in its SOP guidebook.

Most wildlife authorities continue to adopt this age-old viewpoint. The elephant rescues described above may beg the questions that global climate change or human/wildlife interactions or even outcomes caused by tourism contributed to the mud and hole but it would be a stretch to do so.

But McRabb’s honest admission and the rescue last week in Amboseli suggests researchers are changing their minds about this maxim, not just rationalizing it.

Oscar Horta at the University of Santiago de Compostela published one of several “seachange” position papers two years ago, arguing in meticulously logical detail that wildlife intervention may now be the right moral course for researchers to take.

But whether these decisions are coming from the gut as with McRabb or the frontal cortex as with Horta, there is no question the trend is gaining wide acceptance.

The days of Albert Schweitzer might be at hand.

Yet the much respected Nature magazine, which has been undertaking a lengthy discussion of this issue for several years, suggests otherwise. In its final position paper this year “Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation: What Should We Try to Protect?” biologists as well as ethicists from universities in Texas and Cophenhagen labored to reduce the complex conversation into five major issues.

I’ll let you follow the link for the minutae but I think they’re self limited conclusion still remains obvious: “We do maintain that explicit consideration of the values at stake should underpin careful debate about … whether constant human involvement in … wild areas is desirable.”

I don’t think they do think it’s desirable and I know they’re terribly worried about what a stink this will make.

For many years I was no board with what I think is Nature’s foundational conclusion. But I, too, am changing.

It’s not because I’ve grown more sensitive to animals, and I worry very much about the anthropormorphization of wildlife that occurs with this assumed growing sensitivity. Rather, I think it’s an admission that the wild is just not the wild, anymore.

There is already too much intervention in almost every nook and cranny of this planet to argue that there is anything unimpacted by development or human activity. It takes no scientist to know this. More people, more industry, more cabon dioxide, less of everything that was once in the beginning natural.

And given that state, however nostalgic we may be for the Garden of Eden, saving life and perhaps evening increasing life’s happiness becomes almost a first principal.

The Science of Ivory

The Science of Ivory

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

Science rarely trumps politics, but for elephants and other big game it may, soon. And surprisingly, that’s not necessarily good.

Rapid advancements in forensic genetics now empower even Third World countries to determine the origin of virtually any big game animal from a whisker of its hair. The Kenya Wildlife Service recently announced the opening of its modern genetics and forensics laboratory which will be able to do just that.

KWS was answering the clarion call to “bring those poachers to justice!” By swabbing a poached animal site, evidence is acquired that can be matched from suspect’s clothing and tools, at airport check posts and cargo containers.

And the science stretches beyond enforcing poaching laws. Tracking species survival will now be much easier, and recognizing sudden weaknesses as well as strengths in species will allow for better wildlife management.

That’s fascinating, right? Yes, but is it all good news?

Well, ultimately, of course. But the rapidly improving science is a powerful new tool against strengthening the worldwide CITES treaty. (Did I say against?)

The southern Africans for years have been arguing that CITES – which is a worldwide treaty that bans international trade of certain animals (dead or alive) – is too punitive against those countries (like themselves) that have internal mechanisms to prevent illegal poaching. The treaty was born in the mid 1980s as a device to halt the apocalyptic decline of elephants, and it worked beautifully.

Since then it has become a massive powerhouse for global species preservation. Everything from polar bears to certain butterflies and whales have been preserved by the world coming together and agreeing not to allow those animals to be traded in any way.

But for years in southern Africa, elephant ivory was a cash cow (or bull, depending). Extremely well run and patrolled parks in southern Africa collected heaps of tusks from elephant that died normally or were intentionally culled. This cache of animal goods, in fact, was for many years the principal source of revenue for the Zimbabwe National Parks.

CITES stopped that. Adjacent to many southern African parks can now be found warehouses of stored elephant tusks and rhino horn. They store it, because some day, they want to sell it. Right now, CITES prevents them from doing so.

CITES came on line powerfully by the end of the 1980s, and shortly thereafter, South Africans began focusing on the promise of forensic science to determine exactly where the ivory came from. South Africans developed some very creative non-genetic, isotopic or chemical methods to determine the origin of confiscated, illegal ivory.

As genetic forensics improved, CITES also did, because both proved so successful. By 2004 South Africans were desperately trying to get the world to use forensic genetics to limit CITES’ reach:

“Being able to track the origin of illicit African elephant ivory could [allow] several southern African countries … to relax the ivory ban because they have stores of ivory and lots of elephants.“

From the getgo few have questioned the southern African claim that they manage poaching well enough. It was known from the early 1980s that the danger to elephants and other big game came mostly from the northern half of the continent.

Why, then, should they be penalized from selling their legitimately harvested ivory and horn?

Because science can’t trump politics. The “free market” however it may be regulated in China is free enough on the global arena.

In 1997, 2000 and again three years ago, CITES caved under the pressure of southern African countries and “carefully” organized the sale of stockpiled ivory in a few highly regulated auctions. Each time the results were stunning:

Poaching increased measurably and substantially.

In other words, once new ivory started trading in Asia legally, black market ivory followed suit.

Although southern African countries aggressively argued that the black market was not related to the auctions, it was a hollow fight. Now, as science progresses, their argument is changing and acquiring greater force:

Genetic science can pinpoint where the ivory comes from. In southern Africans view, there is “legal” ivory and “illegal” ivory, and whether it is at cargo warehouses or jewelers stores, genetic testing devices can separate the legal from illegal trade.

The argument is very similar to the recent argument that appropriate testing can distinguish between legally mined diamonds and blood diamonds. In fact determining the origin of ivory is much easier now with genetic forensics than determining the origin of diamonds.

There’s a very provincial nearly insidious thrust to the southern African argument. I believe in their heart of hearts they know that a market widened by allowing genetic testing to scrutinize increased sales of ivory will ultimately decimate elephant in the north of the continent.

And I believe in their heart of hearts they figure, well that’s OK, we’ll protect them down here. And indeed, they could. So the extinction of the wild elephant might be unlikely… in the south. And to hell with the north. ‘If they can’t get their act together as we have, too bad.’

To be sure it’s a serious sacrifice asking the south to forego legitimate conservation revenue just because the north isn’t as developed as they are. And with the advancements announced of the sort KWS did this month, the south will be ever the more eager to promote its cause.

But it’s the difference between seeing yourself in your narrow little part of the world, and recognizing your role as a global actor.

There’s just no reason that elephant anywhere should be sacrificed to intricate ivory sculptures placed in a glass case. That tradeoff – a living work of art for a dead one – isn’t moral in my view.

There’s little sacrifice to taking the moral road.

Outlaw Cats?

Outlaw Cats?

by Arusha ♥ 9 Comments

India’s Supreme Court has banned tiger safaris in an attempt to stem their extinction. The decision has enormous implications for wildlife tourism worldwide.

Almost all wildlife tourism featuring wild tigers is in India. (A much smaller industry remains in Nepal, and even smaller in Russia.) Although there is a variety of larger mammals in India’s game reserves, tigers are by far the main attraction for foreign tourists. The decision could doom Indian wildlife tourism to its own extinction.

The Supreme Court’s simple decision on July 24 which “banned all tourism activities in the core areas of tiger reserves” followed an April 3 court directive to individual Indian states for wildlife management plans to protect tigers in face of a rapid decline.

The Court was reacting to the fact most of the States had not submitted any such plans. But the likelihood that the decision could be reversed if the States get their acts together is very small.

Few plans were submitted because nobody knows what to do. There is a decline in big cats worldwide that has miffed researchers. Nobody knows how to stem the decline. Nevertheless, the court will revisit its decision on August 22. Most of us do not expect it to reverse this decision.

In Africa as in India more big cats are being documented as having been poached, or more correctly, killed by owners of stock being molested by the big cats. Clever use of modern poisons lacing meat placed out as bait is the principal tool.

But the rapid decline (in East Africa, the lion population is down to around 9,000 from 30,000 twenty years ago) cannot be attributed to poaching alone.

My own feeling is that the increased urbanization of the developing world combined with confusing but rapid global warming changes is clobbering the top of the wilderness food chain. Ranchers poisoning lions to save their cattle is a symptom of this.

In India the issue is even more confused since a tiger skin is worth so much more on the black market than a lion skin. A male tiger can be more than twice the size of a female lion, its fur is much thicker and arguably more colorful. Though the motivation for a tiger killer might be to save his cows, once killed he has acquired a very valuable item easily black marketed for an extraordinary price.

The actual numbers of larger wild mammals in India as in Africa is actually increasing as wildlife management improves and the remaining habitat for them is better protected. But even though the food source is theoretically then increased for the larger cats, their overall habitat may be more stressed as more animals are squeezed into smaller areas.

This can lead to increased territorial fighting and a more rapid transmission of disease. Recently, for example, it was discovered in East Africa by researcher Craig Parker that some of the lion deaths there were attributed to a disease that was sweeping through the buffalo populations. Lions hunted buffalo and acquired the disease themselves.

India’s corrupt and complicated political system leaves open the possibility the court decision will not be fully implemented or at least not very quickly. Tourists also need to be very alert, now, as officials and business owners in some of India’s 600 so-called wild tiger reserves scramble to maintain business.

Ranthambore is one of the most important reserves, with 52 known wild tigers. There were indications recently that officials were going to move older tigers out of its central reserve into a buffer area that they would enclose, large enough that tourists wouldn’t realize when driving into it that it wasn’t the unfenced and open park.

India’s position has worldwide ramifications. The percentage decline and rate of decline of lions in East Africa is not quite as severe as tigers in India, but it’s severe. And what about polar bears in North America? Or walruses? Or even bears in certain parts of Alaska?

In India at least the highest court has decided that tourism contributes to tiger decline, or at least impedes tiger conservation.

To protect wild animals, should tourists be banned from seeing them?

Weeding the World

Weeding the World

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

The loss of wilderness critically impacts our lives. African compromises known as “same species intervention” and “protected wilderness” may be bitter sweet solutions.

I just returned from a visit to the Amazon where I saw first hand the destruction of the planet’s jungles, the transformation of its rivers into commercial pathways for man’s insatiable consumables, and the slaughter of its wildlife.

But as sad as this is to see, it’s nothing new. I’ve watched it happen my whole life in Africa.

The human/wildlife conflict is well known and less contentious, really, than simply troubling. When a decision must be made to choose between man or wildlife, or between man’s survival or the destruction of the wilderness, there’s no question in my mind that man must prevail.

Many have argued that conflict doesn’t exist: that man and the wild are never completely at odds with one another, that both can be preserved. But I think that’s either nonsense or simply employing impractical logic. We cannot reverse quickly enough our use of fossil fuels, our need to eradicate poverty, or our endless warring ways, to abate the destruction of the wild in any macro economic way.

More reasoned intellects argue that we are essentially crippling ourselves each time we cripple the wilderness. And there is powerful evidence to support this, not least of which are the many organic drugs discovered in the natural wild. But this becomes an odds game. What are the chances we’ll find another cancer drug in the Amazon before Rio’s favelas either waste away in cholera or typhoid or explode in revolution?

And the finally there’s that ludicrous notion that we can make wild, wild. Pull out that garlic mustard plant, John, and save the wilderness from itself!

What we don’t get is that the wild nature of the wilderness, its own ability to decide what to do with itself, is critical to the very nature of man; after all, we are an organic beast. If we disown the wild by claiming we know better than its intrinsic self how to preserve itself, we disown part of our own essence. Is that necessary?

It’s taking an enormous risk. We’re gambling that we don’t need to know the things of the wild that for the moment remain its mysteries. Pluck that garlic mustard and who knows what else you’re plucking from existence!

I think Africa may be providing a couple compromises. They aren’t holistic solutions, but it may be the best we can do.

Yesterday “Gorilla Doctors” treated a festering wound of a silverback who had been in a fight with another male. They did this by darting the animal with a powerful antibiotic.

The group also reported a rather quiet start to June, with “few interventions” that nonetheless included anti-biotic treatments of juveniles and darts of anti-inflammatory drugs to relieve pain.

Gorilla Doctors is a new phenomena in my life time. I remember in the mid 1980s when scientists argued for months over whether to intervene in two crisis situations in the wildernesses of east and central Africa.

The first involved the mountain gorillas. One of the animals was identified as suffering from measles. The only possible way that could have happened is that a tourist had transmitted it to them. The question was, do we use the simple and available medicines we have available to cure the disease, or do we let the baby gorilla die?

There were two compelling arguments to treat the baby gorilla. The first was that man himself had upset the balance of the wild, since it was man that introduced the disease. The second was that the disease had an epidemic potential. If not treated, the entire population was at a greater risk of extinction.

The decision to intervene is not reversible. It sets the stage for an uncommon relationship between man and the wild he wants to protect. Once the vaccine was used, every baby gorilla that was subsequently born would have to be vaccinated. Just like humans. And that’s exactly what’s happened.

Not too long thereafter, mange raced through the population of cheetah living on the East African plains. This beautiful cat is highly inbred, which means that throughout its wild population any disease can be devastating. Mange is ridiculously easy to cure. Just puff a bit of antibiotic powder pretty randomly over some part of the animal near an orifice and poof, cured.

And that’s what was done.

Since these first two breakthrough interventions in the wild, intervention has developed exponentially. And the justifications for them have become less and less simple. Successful vaccinations of pet and feral dog populations on the periphery of wild dog populations proved successful in increasing wild dog populations. But now, it appears the wild dogs must be vaccinated, too.

Each one of these interventions alters something that was wild into something less so, but ensures the preservation of that alteration with much greater certainty than its original wild form. We call this “same species intervention.”

This stands in marked contrast to plucking garlic mustard from county preserves. Same species intervention attempts to preserve a life form (mountain gorillas, cheetah) without altering the biomass around it. The second presumes to prevent destruction of other life forms by eliminating the first (garlic mustard for who knows what).

I find the first strategy tolerable; the second not. Both strategies tamper with the mysteries of the wild, but the second strategy tampers with too many mysteries, it exceeds the threshold of destroying one thing for another.

But these examples of deciding how to preserve life forms are only a part of the story. In fact, perhaps the smaller part.

Human/wildlife conflict is more pronounced than ever. It comes as no surprise but our preparation for its arrival was negligent. Elephants destroying farms, schools, threatening bicyclists and cars; lions worse than coyotes or wolves for taking down farm stock; Asian carp or zebra mussels screwing up our sewage systems much less redactional fishing!

Fences.

Africa is fencing all its wilderness. It began years ago with such mammoth projects as the 22,000 sq. mile Etosha National Park in Namibia, or the legendary Kruger National Park in South Africa (where part of the fence has now been removed, by the way).

More recently and at great local expense, Kenya’s huge Aberdare National Park was completely fenced. There are now calls for Kenya’s best park, the Maasai Mara, to be fenced.

“Fence” is a loose term. It could be moats or other types of semi-natural divisions that nevertheless bind the wild in specific containers we can try to preserve from man’s ruthless development.

Putting a boundary on the wild makes it wild no longer. The dynamic system becomes contained. The chaos and mystery of being undefined and unknown ends.

There are many spiritualist’s who believe this is doomsday:

“We perfect perfection to the point of
complete destruction.
And in the end, we will lose it all
as the weeds grow over our fallen creations
and the wonder of the wilderness returns.”

This final paragraph of Lisa Wields’ poem, “Loss of Wilderness Means Loss of Self,” believes this tact will not prevail.

Unfortunately for the past but inevitably compromised for the only possible future… I believe it will.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Be Careful What You Wish For

by Arusha ♥ 8 Comments

Lion road kill, baby lion attack … two examples this week that we must stop thinking of Africa’s wild animals as human incarnations.

Like a hundreds of other tourists daily, at dozens if not hundreds of similar sites throughout Africa, Madelein Querk was looking forward to that special moment this past weekend when she could actually pet a wild animal. The lion cub bit her in the neck threatening her life, not just her holiday.

A proactive organization studying and promoting lion conservation in northern Kenya called for more “speed bumps” or road impediments on the relatively new Samburu-Marsabit highway after a one-year old lion cub was killed trying to cross the road this weekend.

The two incidents are in some ways dissimilar. The cub attack is the epitome of poor judgment, the logical extension of anthropomorphizing a wild animal into a pet and maybe even a cute little furry baby. The second incident is an excellent example of human/wildlife conflict, but with an error on the side of human.

But they are also strikingly similar in illustrating how we unsuccessfully try to commercialize the wild at great risk to both the wild and us. The wilderness, wild animals and spaces with little or new human intervention, can be protected and conserved to be sure, and generating revenue from those tourists fortunate enough to be able to pay to experience them is a legitimate way of doing so.

But both these examples show this dynamic going too far.

A lion cub is cute in part because we project babyness onto it, the same cuteness of our own experiences with human infants. Sensing helplessness especially is a strong effusion of empathy, and a cynic might even argue an elixir of personal power.

But why don’t we feel the same way when a baby snake hatches? It’s just as helpless. Or a baby shark or baby black widow. Because they’re deadly? So’s a lion. Ask Madelein Querk.

For some reason our non-Maasai culture has codified lions as cuddly but pythons as not. Point is, neither are.

But we commercialized the cuddliness into Teddy Bears and Lion Kings with this haughty notion of generosity filled with forgiveness and redemption until there are piles of childrens’ books affirming the true goodness of Aslan.

Well, lions are good. But not because they obey their mothers and do their homework and help invalid ladies across the street. Their goodness is affirmed when they tear apart a baby wildebeest and eat it alive.

The second example this week is bit harder to understand, and I concede before trying to do so that you need to share my bias first that humans are more important than wild animals. And that is not a bias I came to quickly or easily, and I respect those who differ. Nor am I saying Buddhism be damned. But in the competition of natural selection, I route for man.

The Samburu-Marsabit highway was built by the Chinese to get oil from the desert. They pay well for that privilege and Kenyans welcome the revenue which significantly exceeds the sales of entrance fees into Samburu National Park.

It is also a dangerous place, particularly since the conflict in Somalia came closer. The Northern Frontier has become quite lawless in the last few years. From one sanguine point of view, putting speed bumps on this highway would exponentially encourage shifta, bandits that are notorious in the area.

If Ewaso Lions can demonstrate that this is an integral crossing for lion in the area (as they implied in the article linked above), then build an over- or underpass tunnel as is regularly done for wildlife crossings worldwide. Slowing down the flow of traffic is routing against humans.

In my long career in the wild I’ve grown more and more fond of it. But at the same time I’ve grown more and more angry with attempts to commercialize the wild by either pretending that it is less wild or actually making it less wild against its own nature. And I get particularly furious at efforts to exploit our fantasy empathy at the expense of man’s preeminent needs.

Enjoy the wild for what it is, not what you wish it could be.

Leave It To The Kids!

Leave It To The Kids!

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A 13-year old Maasai boy (genius) who rigged up an electric light device that seems to successfully protect his boma from lions is no longer herding his family’s cows. He’s got a scholarship to one of Kenya’s best private schools!

Richard Turere like all young teen Maasai boys was principally responsible for taking care of the family stock. Fortunately, he found time to go to a local school as well, and the little time he had uncorked his genius.

He put what he learned about electricity and lighting to work for himself! Lions are becoming an increasing bother throughout Kenya, as their habitat dwindles, as agriculture explodes and as prey diminishes. They are more and more often preying on cattle and goats.

The traditional Maasai response is to kill the lion, and in fact that’s happening quite a lot. I’ve written about the horrible poisons that are sometimes used in bait traps, and simple gang spearing is turning into something of a national sport.

In Richard’s own area near Nairobi national park, cattlemen had lost 18 cows, 85 sheep and goats and 14 donkeys since November. Their response was to kill three lion in a single week.

Richard didn’t like that idea, because school had also taught him the importance of wildlife to Kenya’s economy. So he rigged up a series of lights around the kraal in which the stock spent the night, which flashed intermittently and were powered by the same solar panel that ran the family’s TV.

Guess what? No lion! Even while neighbors were still being bothered.

Richard began his experiments when he was 11. He told teachers that he noticed that the lions never struck when people were walking about, including at night with flashlights. Lion won’t come near stock when people are active, so Richard concluded that he could fool the lion into thinking people were around his stockade all night long!

He wired four then five sets of flashlight bulbs around the stockade and connected them to a switching box powered by an old car battery charged by the same solar panel that runs the family’s TV.

The result was a random flashing of lights throughout the night. It seems Richard was right: the appearance is one of people being awake in the area. And while six neighboring farms were attacked by lion in the last several years, the Turere farm was spared!

Richard’s successful and very practical science project got immediate attention country-wide. When the National Geographic Big Cats Initiative found out about it from Wildlife Direct in Kenya, Richard became an instant celebrity. And his genius was doubly rewarded. Not only did he save his family’s lions, but enough patrons came together to send him to one of Kenya’s finest private secondary schools.

The plight of wildlife in rapidly urbanizing Africa looks dim at best to me. But with enough Richards lighting up the darkness, who knows?

Failed Saviors

Failed Saviors

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Are ecotourism and wildlife conservation in Africa so sacrosanct in the minds of their supporters that they’ve dodged proper regulation or perhaps even swerved off moral pathways?

I obtained with pride a Conde Nast ecotourism award in 2004 for my client, Hoopoe Safaris of Tanzania. But in the decade since then my own ideas about ecotourism and NGO involvement in African conservation have changed.

There are two issues, here. The first is that “ecotourism” is no longer a legitimate marker for good tourism practices in Africa. The second is that wildlife NGOs have grown increasingly callous of the priorities of local populations. So the two are related. Both discount the preeminent interests of local people in the areas where they work.

The common thread that I’ve watch develop over the last decade is that western-driven “charity” or “aid” or “consultation” or “community based tourism” has grown increasingly detached from the people who theoretically will benefit from those efforts.

Even if there aren’t contextual conflicts, disputes about goals or methodology, the ignoring of the local populations’ interests spawns conflict. Imagine what you might feel if a Chinese NGO came into your suburban neighborhood and began research then implementation of plans to cultivate an herbal remedy … like garlic mustard… in the city parks. You would at least expect participation in the discussion, and you would become infuriated if you weren’t consulted.

In the last decade African populations have increased substantially, and their educational levels have grown exponentially. Most of Africa is well linked to the outside world through increased internet and cell phone access. This empowers the local communities to better scrutinize their so-called foreign benefactors.

ECOTOURISM IS A SHAM
The academic community has always been skeptical of ecotourism. A 2007 Harvard study of Tanzania ecotourism concluded that while most such projects seemed legitimate, there was a substantial percentage that weren’t. An analysis by Ohio State University in 2011 of Tanzania ecotourism was much more damning. The report actually named (accused) specific Tanzanian operators that were scamming tourists with the ploy of arguing their products were ecotouristic when they were anything but.

The above studies, and many more referenced within them, are convincing documents that ecotourism if not an outright scam is a very poorly formed idea. The initial theories might be good, but implementation seems impossible. And the Ohio State study in particular described why self-appointed certification authorities weren’t working, either, so that the notion of creating some universal standard is mute.

The UN initially thought otherwise. It promoted ecotourism but has since backed away from the idea. Almost a year ago exactly I posted several blogs citing the growing skepticism with ecotourism throughout the world. Nothing has changed; ecotourism as commonly applied in the marketing of travel is neither honest or good.

Khadija Sharife in the Africa Report summed it perfectly last week in the post’s title, “The Drunken Logic of Ecotourism.”

WILDLIFE NGO ARROGANCE
But in the year since I and many, many others pointed out the disservice that using the marketing ploy, “ecotourism,” does to local peoples, another foreign fixture of African life has emerged as equally unfair and misleading: wildlife NGOs.

It will be harder to convince you of this, I know. The loyalty that the world’s great animal savior organizations command is legend. It’s one thing to suggest that a tour company is scamming you while not serving the local populations well. It’s another to make this claim against the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) or the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF).

WWF’s long involvement in Africa stands mostly as a fabulous contribution to baseline research and good management of threatened and endangered species. But as with the morphing of the idea of ecotourism into a marketing scam, it could be that WWF’s longevity of success gave it an unwarranted sense of propriety.

Its most serious conflict is in the Rufiji delta, the outskirts of the great Selous game reserve in Tanzania, which has come under increasing scrutiny because of its enormous hydroelectric potential. A much greater controversy actually than the WWF one I describe below is the World Bank’s program for a hydroelectric dam that could seriously disrupt The Selous and Rufiji delta basin.

But the World Bank’s mission to help developing countries grow can quite plausibly include draining a game reserve for additional electricity. Discussions are heated and ongoing, and everyone accepts one important debate is who should make the decision? Professionals weighing the overall value to Tanzanian society, or local people immediately impacted?

Quite unlike the World Bank, WWF skipped this important debate when it began programs to inhibit rice farming on the outskirts of The Selous. Local rice farmers were obviously the first to be impacted, but they were allowed no input into the decisions regarding the project.

The project mission was always suspect to me, but the rapid implementation without adequate consultation with the local population reeks of arrogance. The entire project has now collapsed into all sorts of criminal and unethical consequences. Eight WWF employees have resigned, plus the Tanzania country director, Stephen Mariki.

WWF should be complemented for trying to right the wrong, but the culture that led to their presumption of determining the life ways of local Tanzanian people is the real problem. And that will be a much harder thing to remedy than just abandoning one project. An overhaul in staff is a good start.

The current most egregious wildlife NGO controversy, however, is on no path to reconciliation because the organization, the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), continues to defend its position.

AWF encapsulates its overall mission in the phrase “heartlands.” Over the last several decades AWF created heartland areas throughout sub-Saharan Africa in which to concentrate its research and assistance. An essential purpose is to create wildlife corridors between established nationally gazetted protected wildlife areas like national parks to increase the potential for biodiversity.

Noble. The problem for some time has been to create these corridors, land must be acquired from private holders. This may have something to do with AWF’s decision to form a close partnership with the Nature Conservancy in 2007.

But what happens when farmers or other landholders don’t want to sell? AWF’s response has been high-handed and infuriated local communities.

In and around their large Manyara ranch holding in Tanzania, AWF negotiated versions of eminent domain with the Tanzanian government that caused enormous friction locally. And now in Kenya their acquisition of land (which they subsequently tried to deed over to a new Kenyan Laikipia National Park) is on track to totally cripple all their good efforts in East Africa.

AWF insists it has been playing by the rules. But two thousand Samburu people don’t care if they were playing by the rules or not; they insist with credibility that they have been displaced against their will.

Unlike WWF, AWF seems to be digging in its heels for a fight that will emasculate it. And if it goes down as I expect it will, so will the reputation and memories of good work that wildlife NGOs have been undertaking for decades in Africa.

Why is AWF resisting an acceptable settlement? AWF is a much younger organization than WWF, and its donor base is much smaller than WWF, much less publicly than individually endowed.

Nature Conservancy is itself a less publicly endowed organization limited to wealthy landowners mostly in Illinois. It could be that these two closely held NGOs feel less vulnerable to public opinion than a more globally funded organization like WWF.

Both these situations — ecotourism as a sham and wildlife NGOs indifferent to local community needs — represent not just outside interference but patent indifference to the preeminent rights of local people. And because that indifference has been so arrogant – dare one say “racist”? – it led these otherwise exemplary organizations into believing they could discount local community interests.

Africa is developing so rapidly I can see incidents of polite refusal, so to speak, of tourist projects and foreign wildlife programs that are put to bed rather easily. The recent controversy in the Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS) involving the translocation of rhino is a good example of “local populations” politely indicting foreign organizations trying to tell them what to do.

But in heated political arenas, this politeness will be lost. WWF had to back down altogether, fire staff and refund grants. AWF should do the same. When sensibilities are exchanged for political control, foreign tour companies and foreign wildlife NGOs have no hope of prevailing.

Beware, guys. A lot of good has come from your work in the last half century. Don’t blow it.

On Safari : Too Many Elephant

On Safari : Too Many Elephant

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

20Mar2012: Taken with my little Canon sureshot, 2x.
There are too many elephant in Africa and it’s going to cause serious trouble, soon. Our first big game park was Tarangire, and as Kathy Kowalski from Sabula, Iowa, remarked, “It’s like driving by cattle in Iowa.”

When I think back the many years I’ve been doing this, and read the statistics of the early days, it’s an unbelievable story. Elephant fill the veld of the northern half of Tarangire National Park like Thomson’s Gazelle on the southern Serengeti plains.

They’re everywhere. Admittedly this is a bit of a dry year so far. (Perhaps not dry, just late rains.) And that is an added incentive for the ele to come down to the river to dig in the sand. But I’ve seen them almost as dense after the rains were well underway.

And as everyone oohs and ahs over the true majesty of the scenes, here, I can’t help but wonder about the farmers on the perimeter, the school children walking to school, and the oxcart suppliers at the village markets. The future of this part of Tanzania and elephants is colliding like the particles in a nuclear reactor.

Of course we saw a lot more in Tarangire than just ele, especially since we were staying in the southern half of the developed park area at Swala Camp. It’s the only camp in the park in the south, and so there are far fewer people. On many of our game drives there were no vehicles but ours.

Ele researcher Charles Foley has determined that the ele in the north are resident, more habituated and easier to approach. The ele near where we stayed are mostly migrants, more skittish and dangerous, and that seemed very true.

We had breakfast overlooking the exquisite Silale swamp, as I always do, but remarkably this time, no animals. Until we started driving along the swamp road and encountered one of the most beautiful leopard sights I’ve ever seen. She was magnificent: lying on a horizontal baobab tree that was already losing its leaves, in front of a morning grey-blue hazy sky. Couldn’t have asked for better.

I pointed out to my group how massive her biceps and shoulders were and how to compare them to the size of her neck. She compares favorably to a number of lineman in the NFL. By the way, before we left Tarangire, we’d seen 6 leopard. Please don’t spread this around. I have many safaris where no leopards at all are seen.

And we saw lion, on a fascinating and recent kill of a giraffe that had fallen into the pond where the lion had obviously ambushed it. The lion were done eating when we arrived, though still guarding the carcass from afar, and I couldn’t help but laugh trying to imagine these water haters eating their treasure.

The lioness had just brought very young cubs down. They couldn’t have been more than 7-10 days old, and of course, they were unable to get through the water to the carcass. But they seemed to have enjoyed their first introduction in the real world.

We went back to the kill the next two days, and very little changed. The lions were asleep in the grass, the vultures were patiently roosting nearby, a jackal or two was running helter-skelter around, but no food feast going on. These lions will likely not kill again in the normal three days, just come back to this mega-sized prey and feed again until they get tired of old meat.

It let me explain to everyone another of the great myths of the African wild: that whatever is killed is gone, finger snap, bingo, just like that. It’s never like that. Unless it’s 8 lion killing one warthog. Even a regular old zebra is going to take a week or more to disappear. So this giraffe could be around for a month.

(There are exceptions which probably created the myth. The density of predators and carrion eaters in Ngorongoro Crater is so high, that a zebra might disappear in a day or two. But for the vast, vast majority of the African veld, this just isn’t the case.)

So we came from Tarangire to one is rapidly becoming my favorite lodge in East Africa, Gibb’s Farm, and here we are for three marvelous days, exploring Manyara and Ngorongoro, before heading into the greatest wildlife experience on earth, the Serengeti.

Stay tuned.

23Mar2012: East bank, Tarangire River, just down from Matete.