Time and again men and women unable to foster human relationships create them with animals whose only ability to resist is to kill them in return.
I love animals and always have. I expect someone watching me play with my lab/hound mix would ascribe all sorts of human characteristics to the relationship, and undoubtedly while playing or petting or observing, I can’t help but see “Morgan” in human terms.
But I won’t buy a cemetery plot for him. I won’t subscribe to PetMeds while monitoring his blood sugar and I’m even adverse to putting gooey tick repellent on him. He isn’t human. He’s a pet.
Throughout my career in Africa I’ve encountered numerous researchers who cross the rational limit of thinking of animals as humans. The most flagrant examples are those ascribed to elephants: how they return to where close relatives have died, how they sacrifice their own well-being for another individual.
Balderdash. These are human behaviors that while I concede we can never scientifically measure in an animal with the clarity that I suppose, I trust my intuition on this one. I even question whether pain as we humans understand it is anywhere similar to what animals experience.
Critics will contend I’m setting up situations that allow for animal cruelty, but that, too, is balderdash. I have a hard time understanding why people swat flies with such vengeance or unload aerosols into gardens or are amused at young boys firing beebee guns at the nearest squirrel. I have serious questions about the morality of hunting animals for sport.
But to think of an animal as a child, or parent, or human friend, is to diminish the radiance of our own place in the biology of the world. It’s a terrible shortcut for trying to understand the complexities of life and does significantly more injustice to that life form than accepting it for what it is.
And it’s so absolutely clear to me whether it’s an old man, doting spinstress, recluse or young career-minded couple that has traded procreation for a more balanced 401K – all of whom embrace their dog with the ridiculousness of human attractions — are doing so entirely, utterly and selfishly to assuage their own inadequacies, and at the horrible expense of the meaning of that dog, the beauty of its form in the biomass in which we also participate.
There are so many negatives to anthropormorphizing animals, but one overriding one is that whatever faux emotion is created in the human master, it probably decreases that person’s empathy to humans in need. It likely distracts the master from the misery of his servants.
And, then, ultimately the price is paid, in an inevitable and ultimate way.
Last month a famous relationship between a hippo and a man came to an end when the hippo killed the man.
The jolly guy, a stellar citizen and former military officer, was a farmer who adopted an estranged baby hippo. (As I once adopted an estranged baby baboon.) He raised it with tender loving care. (As I raised mine.) But when baby turned adult, when the full sense of the creature came to the fore, he couldn’t give way. He claimed again and again, to over a quarter million viewers on YouTube, that everything was just fine.
Marius Els, 41, had no son, no viable human relationship with a child. Why doesn’t matter, but nor should he have tried to create that relationship as a shortcut with an animal. The hippo bit him multiple times, then pulled him into the river and drowned him on November 14.
All we had to do is remember Dumbo jumping away in terror from Mickey Mouse. Instead we spent millions digging earthen moats, sprayed juiced pepper along firebreaks of hay, and I proudly discovered meter squares of steel reenforced spiked concrete. All we needed was a bee!
Five years of research has culminated with a global prize to a young British scientist who has proved how easy it is to keep elephants away from .. well, farmland, schools, roads, in fact anything you want!
Lucy King and Save the Elephants resurrected years old research about how terrified elephants are of bees. Then she intricately studied the sounds bees make, proved that was what sent the elephants fleeing, then combined a productive deterrent with a productive agricultural product and bingo, no eles and lots of honey!
Long before King’s research it was common knowledge that eles flee bees. This upper brain memory in Africa is just like our Walt Disney knowledge of how scared they are of mice. Nice cartoon but .. so what? In fact, it was hard to believe and original science to study it seemed fanciful.
But good science doesn’t mind being embarrassed, and King’s and other’s earlier research showed that particularly in times of drought bees cluster around elephant’s eyes and up their trunks, because of the moisture there. People don’t realize that bees need as much water as pollen to make honey.
King’s research was the culmination of many individual research projects over the last five years, and was awarded the coveted “Thesis Prize” by the Convention on Migratory Species at the annual meeting in Norway.
“Her research underlines how working with, rather than against, nature can provide humanity with many of the solutions to the challenges countries and communities face,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
“Dr King’s work spotlights an intelligent solution to an age-old challenge, while providing further confirmation of the importance of bees to people and a really clever way of conserving the world’s largest land animal for current and future generations.”
King was born in Africa and personally aware of the skyrocketing human/elephant conflict in part an unintended consequence of saving elephants from near extinction. Her work began at Oxford University and the bee studies were her Ph.D. thesis.
It ended in northern Kenya where once all the details of a “bee fence” were engineered, a control study of 34 Turkana villages in a new agricultural area on an elephant migratory route were carefully monitored for elephant incidents.
Seventeen villages were wrapped by newly designed bee hives, and seventeen weren’t. Over a two-year period, the data was striking. Farmland and village domiciles wrapped by beehives went essentially elephant incident free. Unwrapped villages suffered constant incidents.
Originally King and other scientists thought their job had ended a few years ago when they proved that 90% of elephants will flee certain types of bee sounds, mostly those created by the buzzing wings. This sound in turn provokes a very specific elephant alarm call that is not only the sound of a terrified beast running away, but specific enough to cause other elephants in the area to flee as well.
Clearly reproducing the sound was all that was needed. And while that’s technologically easy, it can be expensive and requires maintenance like all fire alarms. Particularly far out in the bush where electricity is erratic.
Boing. Why not do it from the beginning?
Villages now have the added benefit of lots of honey, and the specially engineered beehives designed to increase the longevity of the hive and production of honey are far less expensive and much more durable than electronic sound systems.
Despite all the excitement this isn’t the BEE-all or end-all of elephant deterrents. During periods of drought – which are chronic in elephant land – honey bee populations dive. It might be true that eles get stung more, then, but they also get much less warning since there are far fewer bees making the sounds that scare them away.
So during these frequent periods of low rain bee hive fences lose some of their mojo. King has explained in her research that bees are just one – if the most potent – weapon in a necessary arsenal of elephant deterrence.
Nevertheless, it is clearly the best one so far, and may in fact have a greater application in parts of the world like Asia where human/elephant conflicts are also growing and drought is much less a problem.
Hardly had my business to show people big wild animals got off the ground when Peter Beard published his book, End of the Game. Now, I wonder, are there too many wild animals in Africa?
Yesterday we learned that the predictable “bamboo season” in Rwanda’s Parc de Volcan was bringing “as expected” many of the mountain gorillas out of their reserves into adjacent farmer fields. The battle between the cow and the gorilla, though, was not expected.
Researchers following the Urugamba silverback recorded him “charging a nearby cow” last week, although the expected bloody encounter was avoided when he unexpectedly stopped the chase. But cow-gorilla conflicts while troublesome are not what is principally bothering researchers.
Human-gorilla conflicts are escalating throughout the Virunga range, and give every indication that some biological threshold has been reached. The list is long but began horribly documented in 2007 when irate villagers stoned to death a gorilla that had entered their village.
An EWT client was one of the first ever tourists to visit habituated mountain gorillas back in 1979. Then, there were an estimated 280.
Today, the estimates range between 685 to more than 700, approaching a three-fold increase during my lifetime. Similar numbers apply to many animals throughout Africa, including other headliners like elephant and wildebeest.
Researchers are currently painting the human-gorilla conflict as not necessarily something the gorilla needs, but rather something it wants. This is the “bamboo season” as new shoots grow quickly with the onset of the seasonal rains. Gorillas “love” bamboo shoots.
In PdV many of the best and newest bamboo shoots appear first outside the park. The report of the incident between the gorilla and the cow was concluded by the researcher, “There are sure to be many incidents in the coming weeks surrounding the highly anticipated bamboo season. Stay tuned!”
Interestingly, this is exactly opposite to what the researchers in the PdV’s sister and adjoining park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Virunga National Park, claim. There, researchers wait anxiously for the “moment bamboo shoots are available” when their gorillas end raiding farmers’ crops and return inside the park boundaries.
So it sounds to me that there is no particular reason that new bamboo shots are outside rather than inside a park, and probably, in both parks they’re in both places. The human-gorilla conflict is more serious than where new bamboo shoots occur.
The human-gorilla conflict has been seriously documented ever since 2009 when an interagency working group HUGO was formed to deal with it. The name of the group was changed to human-wildlife conflict, in part because as researchers got into the problem they realized the area’s residents while concerned with gorilla conflicts were equally concerned with other burgeoning wildlife in the park, like buffalo.
A foot-high stone barrier is being erected around almost the entire PdV, and this seems to have helped stopped human-buffalo encounters. Near very productive farms alongside Sabyinyo volcano a trench has been cut, which seems to have impeded human-elephant encounters.
But a successful technique to discourage gorillas has not been found. Several years ago the International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP) encouraged using drums to scare away the gorillas, but one researcher in 2009 said, “I’m told they enjoy the sound and allegedly start dancing when the drums appear.”
And then this year the DRC gorillas became so familiar at tourist camps and area farms, that researchers began using drums again.
They still don’t dance. But it still doesn’t work.
One of the things that gnaws equally at my conscience and nostalgia is that the growing human-wildlife conflict in Africa is a reflection that years ago the precarious state so much big game found itself was, in fact, a natural if precarious balance with man.
But when man discovered he could make money showing animals to other men, which bought time to deliver a growing compassion as well as a separate understanding that biodiversity is essential to man’s long-term survival, big game became nurtured … developed.
And so, surprise, it prospered.
And so did man.
So the conflicts that existed so long ago that nearly made extinct such animals as the mountain gorilla are only more severe, today. The conflict resolutions are becoming more high tech, more intense and understandably, much more expensive.
And in some cases, such as with gorillas, there don’t seem to be any good conflict resolutions.
Ultimately this growing human-wildlife conflict in Africa will reach a breaking point, and if scientists are unable to stop the rate of growth of these animal populations by benign means before this happens, human policy that understandably favors humans will. And it may not be very pretty, then.
Have you ever heard about that little kitty that was taken far, far away and dropped in a forest but found its way back home? What about an elephant?
Last week the Kenya Wildlife Service completed the first of several phases of relocating 200 jumbos as much as 100 miles from where they were picked up. The controversial and very expensive project is one more attempt to “save” elephants by removing them from angry farmers, school children and people walking to church.
Well, we won’t know for a while. But … a couple don’t like their new diggs very well.
Two were killed in Kisii, a heavily populated city in exactly opposite direction from where they were relocated, and although they were “dispatched” by villagers before wildlife officials could identify them with certainty, there’s every indication they were from the relocated bunch.
Those ele would have walked about 50 miles through (human) enemy territory northwest having just been brought 50 miles southwest to the idyllic and peaceful human unpopulated Maasai Mara in the relocation effort. And frankly, whether they were from the relocated bunch or not, their journey from the nearest open reserve (the Mara) shows how capable they are of navigating human population centers.
And at the end of their journey you don’t hear cute little mews at your backdoor.
Pole pole I’m coming round to thinking ele must be culled. I’m not there yet, and I still viscerally resent the mostly southern African theory of “carrying capacity” and that anything that doesn’t meet the model should be eliminated.
(Not just ele, by the way, but Jacaranda trees, certain flies and spots on windows.)
But the situation in East Africa is growing intolerable, and intolerably expensive. KWS has moved the first 50 tuskers at an expense of about $3,000 per elephant.
That’s huge, especially by African standards.
All sorts of things are being desperately tried now to control this human/elephant conflict, from pepper spray, to scare crows, to moats and bullhorns.
The most effective way is already being used in southern Africa (where they don’t need it as much, because they kill their excess!). The seel-reenforced concrete spike barriers employed in Botswana around its national parks tourist camps work well. The problem is they are extremely expensive, too. Each roughly 4′ x 4′ block costs around $10.
That’s the cost in South Africa. First there would have to be a factory built to produce them in East Africa, or the additional cost of importing them to East Africa.
To surround the northern top cap of the Maasai Mara (the southern border sits on the Serengeti) you’d need more than a half million blocks and that doesn’t even take care of the many river boundaries where they wouldn’t work, the labor to do it, they maintenance and the possible environmental fallout of also impeding other wildlife.
And then, of course as the southern Africans would point out, what happens when the density of elephant is compressed to a level that starts to destroy the Mara ecosystem?
You see. The reason the ele are leaving their splendid protected reserves, is because there are too many of them already.
So any successful barrier or relocation effort could end up being counter-productive.
No! Because there aren't any!NPR’s Namibia stories this week distort the overall complexities of human-animal conflicts in Africa as whole. The reporting by Christopher Joyce was an admirable portrayal of one very unusual country’s struggle with wildlife, but when he generalized he was quite wrong.
I hope you listened to the two reports, one on Monday and the other on Tuesday. Read this, then listen to them, again.
Many issues regarding wildlife, hunting and social responsibilities of any country are universal. How to make use in a profitable and sustainable way of these natural resources is an ongoing struggle that I feel is being successfully addressed throughout most of Africa.
But not necessarily the ways Namibia is trying. How Namibia approaches this diminutive national resource is very much different from the rest of “Big Game” Africa. Namibia is a very, very unusual place.
The thrust of Christopher Joyce’s reporting for NPR was that the only way that wildlife can be preserved is by privatizing it. Maybe for Namibia, but dead wrong for Africa and the vast majority of the rest of the world.
A little bit bigger than Alaska, the country is mostly uninhabitable. Nearly half (the western regions that border the Atlantic Ocean) is so dry that some fishermen grow up never seeing rain. Much of this area is the Namib Desert, which is pure sand, and some of the most spectacular dunes on earth are found here.
There is very, very, very little wildlife compared to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, compared to practically any other random part of the world. I can’t emphasize this enough, because Namibia is where many outstanding wildlife research projects have occurred recently. Some have even led to major discoveries (about elephant verbalization, for instance). But this may be the case, indeed because the wildlife here is so scarce.
The NPR report itself confirmed there might be 125 lion in the entire country. That is about the same number of lion for this massive 325000 sq. miles as found in tiny 100 sq. mile Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. For a similar area in East Africa the size of Namibia there is likely upwards of 50 times as many lion.
And that metric applies pretty well for any other wildlife comparison between Namibia and the main wildlife viewing countries of Africa. The exception could be oryx and springbok, two antelope species which do exceedingly well in very dry environments. But except for these two antelope, Namibia is not a place to go to see wildlife.
The most famous wildlife park in Namibia is Etosha Pan, which is about 7% of the entire country’s land mass (22,000 sq. miles). It’s hard to find an animal census for the park, probably because it’s not very good. The Namibian government claims there are 2500 elephant (dubious) and makes the grandiose claim that, “It is well known that Etosha has the single-largest population of black rhinos in the world, but the actual count is kept secret so that this fact – and the population of rhinos it defines – is never threatened.”
Such unsubstantiated remarks need to be taken with a lot of grains of salt, of which Etosha has a vast supply. Moreover I’m absolutely sure there are many more black rhinos in places like Lewa Downs in Kenya as well as in a number of South African private reserves.
Namibia’s richest wildlife area is the eastern Caprivi Strip, the area squeezed between Botswana and Angola which is hardly 300 sq. miles large. This is where many of the private wildlife reserves Christopher Joyce discussed in his radio reports are located. Interestingly, though, it was not where Christopher Joyce of NPR spent most of his time.
The reserves Joyce reported from may have the least amount of wildlife of any of the collection of private reserves in Namibia, which does make it a compelling story as to how they are trying to exploit the little they have. But I am concerned that at no time did he explain this serious difference between Namibia and the more popular areas for wildlife viewing in Africa: i.e., there is hardly any wildlife in Namibia.
(Joyce spent most of his time on the few reserves on arid, near desert terrains where the provocative topic of hunting was raised. I thought he did a decent job with this topic although he might have considered interviewing the equally if not larger segment of the population in Namibia that opposes hunting. Nevertheless, this is a topic universal to privatization of wildlife reserves throughout the continent.)
The Caprivi is a beautiful, wooded and riverine area with a varied biomass, and what to do with it is a critical issue but keep in mind how small an area this is. It may contain up to three-quarters of all Namibia’s non-desert wildlife, but it is one one-hundredth of the country in size, only one quarter the size of Yosemite National Park.
I hope you see where I’m going with this. To call Namibia an African wildlife destination is really rather stretching it. It has some extraordinarily unusual wildlife, because of its extraordinary desert ecologies, well worth a zoologist’s interest. But to consider it a viable tourist destination for wildlife is a ruse.
Namibia’s attractions are grand, but they do not include wildlife.
And it’s probably precisely this reason that the government wants to develop the little that remains as best they can. Fair enough. And it may, indeed, be true as Joyce suggests that privatization of such a minimal resource is the only way to sustain it…in Namibia.
But this strategy is absolutely not an evidently good one for more normal environments elsewhere in Africa, where the wildlife is more naturally abundant. In fact, it’s a major and often contentious issue in areas that have naturally abundant game. Personally I’m in the camp of folks who do not believe that privatization of important national resources like wildlife is good.
And when Joyce ended his final episode by claiming the people “from all over the world and Africa” were coming to Namibia to learn from their privatization projects, I started to laugh then became rather irritated.
It’s like suggesting farmers are traveling to New York see how to grow corn. There is some corn grown on Long Island, and probably in very creative and interesting ways, but it’s sure no general model.
Private wildlife reserves are flourishing all over Africa, hundreds more than in Namibia, because they have much more wildlife to show off. Now it could be that the particular model for Namibia’s privatization is better, say, than Tanzania’s WMA (Wildlife Management Areas) or South Africa’s private wildlife zoning ordinances, with regards to fairness to the local population or to the wildlife or whatever. But Joyce didn’t explore this.
Namibia’s future is not with wildlife. Its tourism development must — and has, actually, at least until now — feature many other wonderful things before wildlife. Wildlife could be the icing on the cake of a fabulous Skeleton Coast safari, but the cake is substantively without animals.
Moreover, Namibia’s broader economic and social development is not with wildlife. It is squarely with how to divide the special wealth from its rich deposits of uranium, diamonds and a few other minerals; and with the growing conflicts with its rapidly developing indigenous populations like the Ovahimba.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all be fascinated by the story Joyce told. Just put it in perspective, which he should have done but didn’t.
Bumpy road, alkaline dust, wind in your face. And a honey badger, some impala, hartebeest, elephant, a serval in a tree killed by a leopard and a family of 11 lion taking down a bull buffalo.
Anyone who only reads first paragraphs might be misled.
It was hardly an ordinary start. We lucked out big time. Sue MacDonald kept saying “I don’t believe; can you believe it?” And as is often the case with great game drives, it was basically luck and not strategy that took us to this extraordinary beginning.
Following the first couple days in Nairobi for our normal political and cultural touring and to shake as much jetlag as possible into the congested throngs of people we walked through on the street, we flew into the southwest Serengeti, to Ndutu Lodge. Yesterday there were two others besides our group, and today we’re alone. This is because of the common knowledge that the migration which is centered here in March and April is long gone.
But what so many television special driven tourists don’t reflect on is that animals and wilderness does not follow a TV schedule. It goes on year-round. Sure there will be times that will basically provide more animals than others, but there are very special things that happen at all the different times of the year.
I’ve written before about the discovery of the buffalo virus that was leading to more lion kills and lion deaths, but even so lion killing a buffalo is no easy task. I don’t think a lion even considers taking down a buf unless more customary food like zebra and wildebeest aren’t available. It would be like going to Whole Foods for a last-minute Friday snack and buying a complete Angus.
And that’s the case at Ndutu in the middle of the dry season. (By the way, we arrived in a rain storm, and it’s rainy today as well, but that’s really unusual. And the area essentially remains very dry.) So for the lion of Ndutu, dinner is always a challenge.
We’d heard in the middle of the night the anxious lion roars and hyanea yelps. We’d hardly been out for a few minutes past daylight when Dixon spotted a lone female walking fast on the top of a ridge about 500 yards away.
We drove up to her and I immediately noticed that she was limping, and that her belly was terribly contracted, a sign she hadn’t eaten for days. Clearly last night she was involved in a failed hunt of something that injured her right shoulder.
She took no notice of us and kept on her mission driven limped walk. She hesitated only momentarily to call and then listened as another lion called back from the far distance. She started to walk again.
Then all of a sudden out of some low bushes runs a subadult male covered in blood. The female we had been following laid her ears close to her head, turned tale and began running with the bloody faced male in close pursuit.
She was obviously not a part of the pride that currently owned this territory, but rather than following her we wanted to figure out the bloody face of the pursuer.
Soon we found other lion, three mature females and five cubs of various ages, all bloodied but clustered together as if something was attacking them.
Then we saw literally ten feet from our car in the bush a giant male buffalo.
He was obviously dying. The giant, awesome beast lifted his head back towards me and I saw that distinctive glaze in the eyes of a dying animal. Animals have expressions just like us, just not in the face.
Every time a lion got near him he’d stand up and begin to swing his deadly horns.
The older lion knew to stay well away, but the younger kids couldn’t suppress their hunger. They would move towards him, even jump on him, and he’d growl and swing his head. The youngest cub, about 4½ months old, got a seething cash on his little neck.
So we watched this for some time as the buffalo seemed to be on his last breath, and then when he seemed to stop breathing, a lion would close in, and he would stumble to his feet swinging his head, braying.
Finally, still alive, he lost all strength and the family knew it. They were on him at once: the kids on the back, the larger lion digging into the soft flesh areas. We left before he was dead.
A few hours later, on our way back to the lodge, we stopped to review the situation, and the buf was dead. In just that short several hours the lion had carved an enormous amount from the available meat and most were too full to eat another bite. But the male was close on the kill, as they always are, reluctant to give way so long as a single morsel of meat is left.
Even though he was too full to eat it.
Then came our second wonder. Two elephant were strolling down the lake shore which was about 50 yards away. But the wind was directly on them, off the kill, and immediately the mother ele started scenting the air.
Before long she was charging the lion, chasing them away and trumpeting loudly. The lion dutifully stood clear, the male the last to do so, and she kept up the harassment until for some reason she felt appropriately vindicated, and went off.
No. It was not an ordinary start to a safari. But on the other hand it wasn’t totally unusual. This is the most stressful time for Ndutu. Except for the aberrant rains that came with us, the veld is parched, a powdery salt blown almost like smog into the mostly still veld by the dawn and dusk breezes. Unlike March when I’m here, there is only a fraction of the normal bird song, a thin sliver of the number of animals always here then.
But predators don’t migrate. If they’re to survive, this is when they have to show their stuff. And for the lucky visitor, like us, a once-in-a-lifetime scene unfolds into our own alien world.
I'm no photographer. But I took this, this year, with my Cannon SureShot.Widely circulated reports about a crash in Kenya’s Maasai Mara wildlife are (1) premature, (2) likely false and (3) infuriating. PS (4) I’m fed up with western news sources about Africa. Unless it’s another apocalypse, it isn’t published.
Many of you truly concerned wildlife enthusiasts have sent me the link to the bad BBC story claiming that Kenya’s best game reserve is in a tailspin. Thank you, but take a powder and lie-down.
The purported “study” by Joseph Ogutu at the University of Hohenheim is the second study by Ogutu on the Mara. His first purported up to 95% of certain animals had disappeared and was uniformly dismissed by scientists worldwide.
I found it interesting this morning that the branch of the university that Ogutu is supposedly registered with, has an “internet problem.” Linking to the Bioinfomatics Unit of the University of Hohenheim cited in the BBC report generates this message [poorly translated from the German]: “Because of maintenance work the Intranet and some other homepages are not available.”
Hmm.
Mara wildlife has declined, and local wildlife censuses have confirmed this, but nowhere near as catastrophic as suggested in Ogutu’s report. Ogutu told the BBC that Mara wildlife had declined by “two-thirds.”
Nonsense.
Here’s the truth. No one knows in any good scientific way. The Kenya Wildlife Service conducts wildlife censuses that are excellent, but KWS has limited jurisdiction in the Mara which is technically controlled by local county counsels. In fact as I’ve decried loudly before, the Mara’s catastrophic problem is management not an apocalyptic reduction in game.
At one point three separate entities were controlling what we call “the Mara” and they didn’t like one another. So it’s literally impossible to conduct uniform studies over the area. And to make matters worse, historically the data is equally terrible.
Ogutu did the worst possible research as a result. He picked and chose segmented area studies over 15 years, none of which were comprehensive of the area as a whole. Moreover, I’m certain in the weeks ahead real scientists will challenge much of his root data.
Ogutu had decided the Mara was in a tailspin even before he did this study. Last year when the area was just recovering from a three-year drought, he claimed half the animals in the Mara were gone by incorrectly citing a continent-wide study
from the United Nations Environment Programme and London Zoological Society which addressed the whole continent, not just the Mara.
There are good studies, particularly from the Frankfurt Zoological Society, on the biomass of the Serengeti and larger Serengeti/Mara ecosystems. There are also good studies on individual species, like lion and elephant and so forth. And unfortunately, we can only surmise by broad intersections of these individual studies what the situation is, in the Mara.
It’s OK.
It’s very threatened, perhaps more so than at any time before. This is mostly because of (1) weather, also closely because of (2) Kenya’s rapidly developing economy leading to human/wild animal conflicts, and interminably (3) the untenable way the poor reserve is managed.
But don’t write it off, yet. Kenyans are remarkably creative these days.
Ogutu is correct that there has been a significant decline in Mara herbivores, particularly with regards to the wildebeest migration. But this is not directly due to cattle grazing encroachment as he claims. It is because of weather. Two dynamics are at play.
First, the Serengeti just below the Mara has been much wetter than normal (as has the Mara) but while areas just immediately to the north and east have been much drier. Global warming at its best on the equator creates these weird and frighteningly small and distinct weather regions.
So while there were floods in the Mara, in adjacent cattle grazing Koiyaki and Lemuk private reserves, it was bone dry. In times of drought cattle tended by cattle owners over compete with wild game.
Second, because the Serengeti has been wetter than normal, the wildebeest have not needed to move into the Mara (the furthest northern part of their migration) with the same regularity as in the past. Historically the Mara was the wettest part of the Serengeti/Mara ecosystem. That definitely is changing. There will be less and less of the migration traveling into the Mara, now, with global warming.
The wildebeest population has remained constant at around 1.5 million animals for more than ten years. Ditto for the third of a million zebra.
So without intending to minimize the real threats existing in the Mara, let’s not exaggerate them, either. I wish Vanity Fair or the New York Review of Books would do a story. There is no new crisis in the Mara. Visitors today will notice little difference from ten years ago, except maybe with regards to the migration.
Rather there is a continuing decade’s long crisis we definitely need to do something about, which cannot exclude global warming. And there is an ever deepening crisis in the way we learn things.
The idiot at the bottom of the hill below my house who poisons squirrels isn’t very sophisticated, but unfortunately, help is on the way for him. New genetic studies are unleveling the playing field and the wilderness — in Africa at least — is set to suffer.
Not everyone longs for a vacant plain on the Serengeti over which to spread their soul. There’s a lot of people who truly believe the human mind is the only center of value, and that it’s more or less self-contained, immune to its surroundings or at least protected from them, depending upon how smart it is.
So you don’t need towering mountains or raging rivers, or awesome polar bears or freakish spring hares to help you work out the meaning of life. All you need is Proust. That’s the epitome of the self-centered human.
And then there’s the Obama Mediator Ecologist (OME), trying futilely to bring diametrically opposing sides together by organizing weekend committees to pull out mustard grass from forest preserves. This is, of course, the ultimate exercise in wasted time, but it fools participants into thinking they don’t have to choose sides.
But the sides are impermeable to one another, no matter how many fools are temporarily dissuaded. It’s not possible to intervene in the wild “a little bit.” You either put a ten-foot, electrified brick wall around the forest preserve and inventory every microbe in the ground, or you let it run wild.
Since putting a ten-foot, electrified brick wall around the forest preserve and managing every microbe therein has been until now completely impractical, the wild has persisted. But scientists on the self-centered human mind team have a new strategy terrifying to the wilderness.
Genetic engineering.
I wasn’t so upset with genetic engineering until the announcement last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) about the discovery of the gene in domestic African cattle which if activated will give it the same protection from the tse-tse fly that wild animals have naturally.
This will be a devastating blow to a number of wildernesses, including the Mara, the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. Let me explain.
Virtually all of Africa’s remaining great wildernesses are surrounded by farms and many of them by cattle farms. But domestic cattle (at least until now) can be killed by the tse-tse fly which carries bovine trypanosomiasis or “sleeping sickness.” Wild animals are immune.
So while visitors to the national parks will find funny shining blue or black pieces of plastic flapping off trees near their lodging killing tse-tse helter-skelter, wildlife officials actually nurture tse-tse in other areas of the park. Why nurture this gruesomely annoying little pest? Because it’s the best way to patrol the park to keep out domestic stock.
Domestic stock eat an enormously greater amount of vegetation than their wild counterparts, and if allowed run of the wild would essentially starve the naturally wild animals out of the parks.
Tse-tse are easily eradicated, and human sleeping sickness (which is different from bovine sleeping sickness) has been mostly eradicated throughout much of Africa. Despite its awesome proboscis, the tse-tse is one of the dumbest creatures on earth. Flap some brightly colored cloth in the air and it dives into it proboscis deployed.
Spray the brightly colored cloth with pesticide and it becomes the ultimate insect kamikaze. No need for mechanical spraying strategies or search-and-destroy techniques, just advertise, “Come kill yourself! Come kill yourself!” and the tse-tse dumbly complies.
But wildlife officials have carefully not eradicated all the tse-tse. And this, in part, has kept domestic stock outside wildlife parks.
But now, the PNAS scientists have identified the gene that wild animals use to become immune to tse-tse’s package of death. And they’ve identified it currently suppressed in the greater domestic cattle community throughout Africa and are engineering ways to manifest it throughout the industry as a whole.
I’m sure the intentions of the scientists were pure. They were motivated, the report says, by a $5 billion annual loss in cattle production to bovine sleeping sickness.
And as I always remind myself, why should farmers be given any less assistance than the wild? The great wildlife fence in Botswana, which decimated the wildebeest population in the 1980s, did its trick: it protected and helped increase beef farming so important to Botswana’s economy.
So I don’t really know what SHOULD be done. I only know what IS being done, and it seems a relentless effort to assist mankind necessarily at the expense of the great wild.
Animals are not people. Sorry about having to tell you this, they are living things deserving our utmost respect, but there’s not a hippo I know who is really Mama Cass with a preference for long, lacey dresses.
I’ve tried avoiding the attached video, just as I’ve tried avoiding talking about the lion who adopted an oryx in Samburu, or the buffalo gang war that saved junior from the teeth of Capt Cook’s nemesis. But, alas, too many of you have sent me this video.
It’s definitely fun to watch. Wrongly characterized as the local EMT or school-crossing guard, a hippo “escorts” little animals across dangerous places. First a young wildebeest.
Then, a very young zebra, I’d estimate less than three weeks and maybe younger, gets separated from its family as they try to cross through the strong current of the Mara River in the far north Serengeti.
Lost and bewildered, Mama Cass arrives on the scene to escort the darling to a little rock island and watches over it while it regains its strength before sending it striding into its bright future across the final trickles of the stream to land fall.
(Where, I now speculate which is not in the video, it is immediately consumed by a cat.)
The video was shot when a group of tourists including a Tanzanian lodge manager were out routinely game viewing. What was not routine was how that Tanzanian lodge manager has grossly exaggerrated the situation, claimed the hippo “saved” the baby zebra, and subsequently copyrighted the video.
I don’t know the lodge manager, so I don’t know if he really believes what he says. It could just all be the start of a new children’s book series, and if that’s what it is, congratulations Joe you’ve lucked out.
But if there’s one iota of real belief in what he says, he’s nuts.
Here’s my take. It was a pretty large hippo, so likely a female and even more likely a female which had recently (very recently) lost a baby. This occurred during the wildebeest migration with lots of beef running across streams. Ergo, lots and lots of crocs.
The giant crocs especially along the Mara River are remarkable creatures that basically sleep for ten months of the year, waking for around two to eat. When they wake they are incredibly voracious, sloppy eaters.
They have difficulty discerning between a wildebeest and a baby hippo. In fact, I’ve seen them mistake a car tire for a wildebeest.
It’s a dire time for a hippo to give birth. And what that mother in the video was doing was not “escorting” the baby to the shore; quite to the contrary. What she was desperately trying to do was pull it back into open water and make it dive, below where crocs feed.
That’s the strategy for an unfortunate mother hippo who gives birth during the wildebeest migration. Keep the baby as deep in the water, where by the way it’s born to begin with, until the eating machines are full.
So sorry, folks. This was no cross-cultural bioethnic altruism for the good of the wild. It was just another hippo in a group doing what they do best, trying to survive.
And the cathartic tourists shooting the video were just doing what bad tourists do best, making fantasies out of reality.
Here’s a better way. Nick Brandt is one of the most creative artists working in East Africa. He sticks with black-and-white images, and by so doing does what he does best, makes reality out of fantasies.
His photos are remarkable for not being realistic, but futuristic or sometimes even apocalyptic. And in so doing he conveys stellar truths about elephants and lions and so much more, portraying their intrinsic beauty in almost mechanical ways. But most of all, after viewing these photos you are left more with emotions than explanations.
And that’s much closer to representing the reality of Africa’s wild than misinterpreting instinct for empathy. Animals don’t have empathy. We have empathy.
This week the Huffington Post said the “migration was delayed.” True. It was delayed. About as long as getting stuck in Chicago traffic delays a dinner engagement.
“I can assure you the raingods are smiling,” the owner/manager of Ndutu lodge emailed me this morning. “The animals have streamed back onto the plains!… Everything right now is sprouting, growing and sparkling with life!”
The Huffington piece was written by a very respected conservationist, Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club.
Pope’s problem is the same as any other tourist who believes they are Robert Burton searching for the source of the Nile. TripAdvisor is full of this nonsense.
“…gazelles are waiting on the southern grasslands, but the short rains failed this December. The million wildebeest that drive the world’s greatest wildlife spectacle have not yet scented enough rain to trust their destinies to the grasslands. The migration, which follows the rain, must also wait for it,” Pope writes.
Poetic but untrue.
I am fan of the Huffington Post and consider myself allied to anyone who calls themself a conservationist. I’m not saying Pope was lying. His mistake – a very serious one – is suggesting that his one brief perspective from one small area puts him in a position to make such gross generalizations.
It was not immediately clear where Pope had been, but I dare say he probably wasn’t there very long and didn’t have a very good guide.
The Serengeti ecosystem is nearly the size of New Jersey, but unlike New Jersey it lies nearly astride the equator. Weather systems are fabulously complex, there, and especially now with global warming.
There can be small pockets of drought surrounded by areas that are flooded. Right now the northern districts of Kenya are suffering another drought. Perhaps he found himself in one such small area in the Serengeti, but the overall Serengeti is just fine, and actually, quite normally fine.
Pope’s assumption in his article that the herds are drawn by the “scent of grass” or sensitivity to rain is uncertain; we don’t know exactly what prompts the migration. Moreover, grass disappears for other reasons than drought. It can be eaten. By cattle as well as wildebeest, a serious ecological battle raging these last few years at the edge of the Serengeti with Maasai range lands.
He also suggested as typical of a casual tourist that the migration is a single thing — entity — that either moves or not. A million animals does not a marching band make! They are often split up all over terra firma.
He said the “gazelles were delayed.” Thomson’s gazelle often don’t migrate. Some do, some don’t. I see literally tens of thousands of Thomson’s gazelle on the totally desiccated plains north of Olduvai at the driest time of the year, July and the first of August. These marvelous creatures don’t need to drink, and they survive quite nicely by eating the roots of grass.
Pope marked his visit in “December.” But the information I have for December was that light rains began over the grassland plains of the Serengeti December 18 and 19, and the following week saw normal rain patterns. This is about 2-3 weeks late, no more. There was then a let up at the end of the year, as is also normal, and now as the Ndutu owner explains, everything is beautifully green.
Blogs posted by other travelers and tour companies suggest that the bulk of the wildebeest moved through the northern part of the Serengeti out of Kenya as early as the end of November/beginning of December. Right on schedule.
Several weeks later, perfectly positioned to profit from the first rains of the season, the herds were mostly divided widely between the Kusini plains to the west and the Gol Kopjes to the east.
This is the real magic of the migration. Until these first rains fall germinating new grass, there is simply no understandable motivation to draw the large herds into the area. Yet they come, year after year after year. Many believe as I do that it is a homing instinct triggered not by “scent of grass” or of rain, but of a lack of grass whence the herds came.
Whatever it is, this wondrous magic is diminished when respectable media like the Huffington Post publish reputable writers like Pope who offer tiny personal experiences as adequate accounts of complex situations, acting like experts when all they are, are poorly guided tourists.
When you’re sick inside, the outside looks terrible: 2010 was a year of striking differences between surging Kenya and its backward neighbors. 2011 will be the same.
Socially, culturally and politically, it was a GREAT YEAR for Kenya but a BAD YEAR for its neighbors.
Kenya grew fast, started to implement a radical new constitution, improved tourism even while increasing tourist rates, and deftly participated in major global controversies like the CITES attempt to allow selling ivory and the run-up to the South Sudan election.
But the other countries in East Africa? Terrible. Socially and politically Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda all took huge steps backwards. Contested or ramrodded elections, scandals of unbelievable corruption, and horrendous attempts to extinguish moves to improve human rights gave this part of East Africa a 20th century dictatorial look.
And the actual bombings in Kampala that killed more than 70 people almost suggest that when your internal body isn’t doing so well, you’re going to be nicked by the viruses from the outside.
For many years Tanzania’s tourism was inching up on Kenya’s, outpacing both growth and development. Last year that was reversed, and one can only suppose that tourism is sinking with the overall quicksand felt throughout the country.
It was a BAD YEAR for wilderness and wildlife. The “mini-drought” is now two years behind us, and so almost anything looks good in comparison, but there were two horrendous trends appearing throughout East Africa last year:
Poaching and Politics.
There’s always been poaching, but nothing like the corporate poaching that successfully kills and transports out of private, fenced and patrolled reserves a black rhino. That happened in both Kenya and South Africa. And in Tanzania, the Serengeti lost 20% of its wild rhinos (1 of 5, that until now were patrolled like a child in a perambulator with the Nanny’s grip fastened.)
And Tanzania in its drive to become Africa’s newest pariah first spearheaded a campaign to reverse CITES sanctions on selling ivory, and then announced it was going to kill the wildebeest migration with a road.
In Uganda, Father Museveni gave the nod to start hunting, again, and let South Africans develop the hunting of the rare sitantunga, even as its wildlife count declines.
And there’s nearly as bad a flipside to this wildlife story: where poaching and politics aren’t screwing things up, elephants are. The population explosion is eroding the population’s confidence everywhere that governments can keep the jumbo out of the farm.
It just doesn’t look good for wildlife in this turbulent and developing era in East Africa.
It’s hard to imagine 2011 can be as bad. And at the risk of jinxing the whole kebab but being true to end-of-year stock taking, I’m going to predict the Serengeti highway won’t happen, at least not completely as planned. And if we can get at least that victory, I guess the battle continues with some hope.
And with that my marker for WILDLIFE below moves from bad to good.
Strictly economically, Kenya is in the stratosphere, leaving its neighbors way behind. Now a lot of this is foreign donors nudging the county towards implementing the new constitution, so you would normally expect that to end next year. But next year is one year before the next election, and it was the last election when everything fell apart, so I feel this outside stimulus is going to continue. And then, there’s China, flooding Kenya with infrastructure money as if it’s taken a page out of Obama 2.0.
Elsewhere in East Africa, including Tanzania and despite recent fossil fuel discoveries, things don’t look so rosy. Tanzania’s debt is massive, Rwanda’s long flirtation with foreign aid is about over, and Uganda is so mired in bad bookkeeping we can only presume the worst.
I’m afraid that 2011 will be worse for Kenya’s neighbors and probably the same for near inebriated Kenya.
Here’s my summary for what it was and what it will be:
East Africa Report
2009
2010
2011
SOCIETY Kenya The Rest
Good Bad
Good Bad
Good Bad
WILDLIFE
Bad
Bad
Good
WEATHER
Bad
Good
Good
TOURISM Kenya The Rest
Bad Bad
Good Bad
Good Bad
ECONOMY Kenya The Rest
Bad Bad
Good Bad
Good Bad
Predictions are just that, based on the here and now. If Tanzania can move swiftly to its own new constitution, if Father Museveni steps down, if Karume disappears and is replaced by a coalition-building young person, then societies throughout East Africa will improve.
And with the society, so will the economy.
Healthy and diseased female thomson gazelle.
Mutant creatures and animal enigmas will soon be “driving packs of tourists” into Tanzania, according to wildlife officials there. Hmm. Slow news day?
This most recent claim of wild and wooly animal freaks was made by Paschal Shelutete, TANAPA communications officer.
Best diagnosis of the poor bloke Tommie is that she has Cushing’s Disease. The disease is caused by a variety of hormonal or pituary malfunctions and manifests itself differently in humans and animals. In humans the result is often loss of hair, but in animals, it can cause hirsutism, a condition of abnormal hair growth.
The professional level of TANAPA authorities reached new lows this year when they worked to end the current ban on international sales of elephant ivory, and fell in step with the politics driving the Serengeti highway. But this incredible claim by a TANAPA official, wrong on pathology and wrong on geography (his own!) leaves me speechless:
Animal mutations, especially with regards to coloring, are rare but widely known. All the photos you see in this blog I took myself, with tiny little cameras since I’m no photographer. In several cases it’s hardly more than a loss of pigment. In others, like the buffalo in the Aberdare, the weird horn configurations are probably a result of inbreeding.
OK if it's an impala, but not OK if it's a goat?We appear successful in having brought the wild dog back from the brink of extinction without a moment’s reflection as to what that would mean to local people. A terrible mess is brewing.
I have seen wild dogs in East Africa 6 times in the last 15 years, 5 times in the last five years and 4 times this year alone. It’s obviously getting “better.” Time to pop the champagne!
Better not.
This week’s edition of the main Arusha (Tanzania) newspaper claimed that wild dogs were now so numerous that they are routinely killing livestock, injuring herdsboys, and packs in numbers of 20 to 40 dog were now attacking people.
“There is no programme to kill them,” Mr. Dawson Urio, the chairman of Uwiro sub village told the Arusha Times this week.
Remarkable.
Dog are nimble, skilled predators. Their numbers began a near cataclysmic decline in the late 1990s, and scientists knew almost immediately why.
Human populations were increasing, and human populations had lots of pet dogs. These pet dogs were largely immune to dying from distemper, but they often got sick and were rabid transmitters of the disease. And as pet dogs increased, so did rabies.
Distemper and rabies. They were wiping out the wild dog population.
The solution was simple. Go around to all the human populations around wild dog habitats and offer to inoculate the pets free against distemper and rabies.
Guess what. It worked.
But I have to admit not even I realized how this single-minded solution begged a much greater problem, and now, we’re confronting it full on.
Much faster than lion or leopards, much smarter than elephant, wild dogs are the coyote/wolf incarnate. And while coyotes and wolves do prey on some domestic stock here at home, they have nowhere near the opportunities that wild dog do in East Africa.
Literally every wild dog habitat is surrounded by herders with pets. And there is pressure from both sides of the dividing line: the reserves are experiencing rapid predator growth and the private lands just outside are experiencing rapidly increased populations.
Moreover, Maasai in particular, are rapidly learning to breed and sell stock, rather than just accumulate them as they did in former times. This means the pressure is building even more and the food chain is rattling even louder.
The dogs are being sighted everywhere: Arusha, Kilimanjaro, the Mara, Tarangire, Tsavo… even in Kenya’s woebegone Northern Frontier which was just decimated by the drought.
Tuesday, lion researcher Shivani Bhalla reported having seen 21 wild dog just outside Samburu National Park in the Westgate Reserve.
The Northern Frontier (Laikipia) is a vast area, with a biomass much smaller than that found on the great plains like the Serengeti and the Mara. Other predators like lions and leopards generally are in much reduced numbers and confined to narrow habitat bands within protected reserves that have fairly permanent sources of water.
Perhaps, the wild dogs prospered off the corpses of the more than 60% of the livestock that was lost in the drought. Even so, I think seeing this large a group of wild dog in Samburu is extraordinary.
And few predators are as capable as the wild dog. Killing is its entire soul. Much more so than hyaena, they are cannibalistic:
Clearly we’ve got a problem. As at home where exaggerated stories of wolves and coyotes taking babies lacks any evidence, it’s going to be very easy to prove that a half dozen goats have been eaten by wild dogs.
The human/animal conflict is fast becoming the single greatest conservation issue in East Africa, today. Until now it was mostly with elephant.
No one ever expected an animal nearly written off to extinction would actually now be posing an even greater threat to man.
Reports in the media that the great wildebeest migration this year has made a wrong turn and surprised ecologists is absurd. There is nothing anomalous about the migration this year.
The East African newspaper reported Monday that “A change in the spectacular wildebeest migration schedule in the great Serengeti-Mara ecosystem has caught ecologists offguard.”
Using reports that seem confined to a luxury private lodge in Tanzania just outside the Serengeti near the Kenyan border, the article went on to say that 150 – 200,000 wildebeest were reported around this lodge in September, “never before seen.”
This was then picked up worldwide. Such reliable on-line sources for Africa as ETN headlined the same day, “Mystery as great wildebeest migration cut short in Maasai Mara Game Reserve.”
Stop! Stop! This is all wrong!
Now none of this current balderdash is as infuriating as the scandalous “Wildebeest Migration Blogpost” – which of this writing, by the way, hasn’t had an entry since June. That completely misleading blog actually comes out of a South African tour company whose principals are never in Tanzania. Figure that one. Practically everything in that blog is dead wrong.
SO beware oh yee of internet searches.
The main article which started all the nonsense Tuesday seemed to have been motivated by a single blog from &Beyond’s Klein’s Camp, a great private camp just east of the Serengeti and south of the Kenyan border. Their blogs have reported numerous wildebeest herds as early as September. But they’ve been going and coming, as is normal in a year of heavy rains.
This has been a year of heavy rains.
Deeper into the Mara, that is further north from Tanzania, many camps like Governor’s reported “best migration season ever” this year, which would normally mean Tanzania saw nothing abnormal at all.
What’s the truth?
The truth is that it has rained so heavily this year, that there is good grass in many places that in normal years there would not be good grass. This means the migration is spread out all over the place.
Tourists – even veterans – tend to report they’ve seen a “great migration” when at best they can see only a tiny fraction of the herds. There are likely 1.5 million wildebeest.
When I sit atop Wild Dog Hill southwest of Ndutu in late March and look around me for 360-degrees over flat plains covered by wildebeest, from a horizon on the west that is probably 60-70 miles from the horizon on the east, we are probably at best seeing a quarter million. This scene only happens in the southern Serengeti from February – April if the rains are normal. Only a teeny-weeny fraction of tourists ever sees this.
The vast majority of tourists see “the migration” as large numbers of wildebeest moving across the plains or jumping over rivers, and these groups probably at most number a few thousands.
Smaller events like these can happen in a thousand different places nearly at the same time! These are usually in the last half of the year, mostly reported from Kenya’s Maasai Mara (because that’s where most of the tourists go). But these types of events can happen almost anywhere year-round depending upon the rains.
Wildebeest don’t have schedules. Unlike monarch butterflies or Wilson’s warblers, they aren’t triggered into migration because of changing daylight or diminishing temperatures. Unlike caribou or polar bears, they aren’t triggered into migration because of ice. They move to wherever they can get a good meal, whenever they can get a good meal.
It’s just that over centuries the rainfall has been more or less regular. (That, by the way, may be changing with climate change, but not enough yet to alter long-term statistics.) Normally, heavy rains fall on the southern Serengeti during the first half of the year, and heavy rains fall in the Mara (northern Serengeti) during the last half of the year.
So, normally, they move south to north around mid-year for the rain produced grass, and then return north to south at end-year for the rain produced grass.
This year there was a lot more rain than normal everywhere, and it ended later and began earlier. So wherever they moved they could eat. So they’d eat themselves out of one place, then race over to another. Then it would rain where they just were, so they’d race back. This is not unusual.
The reporter got charged up when he made the mistake of asking Tanzanian scientists what it all meant. In complete deflection of the facts, the Tanzanians basically said it was great … because the “unusual ecological change” meant there were more wildebeest in Tanzania than Kenya, and they just love to stiff their Kenyan counterparts.
For tourists, it was great everywhere! So don’t worry either if you’re a traveler or a lover of animals. Everything’s doing just fine.
Elephants are on the rise, in numbers, in tusk size, in populations, and their growing battle with humans is straight on the top of the mind of Tanzanian voters going to the polls this week.
Lots has been mentioned about the side issue of the proposed Serengeti highway in this weekend’s elections, but an underlying component of that issue can be reduced to elephants.
It’s been more or less accepted in the campaign that if built completely the Serengeti Highway will diminish the vibrancy of the Serengeti/Mara ecosystem mainly by disrupting the wildebeest migration. But this amazing herd does not wander like elephants, and when politicians speak of foreigners’ interests lying “more with animals than people” what is understood is “more with elephants than farmers.”
Our non scientific elephant viewing this year has been phenomenal. I have to stretch my memory back to the seventies to recall the numbers and sizes of elephants we saw this year. And if I as a casual observer had this experience, imagine what the farmer saw.
In fact, several times I saw what the farmer saw. Twice I watched farmers chasing elephants off crop land, obviously at great peril to themselves.
We are waiting anxiously for an important elephant report scheduled to be published before the end of the year by WCS that will show in much greater detail the state of elephants in Tanzania. But we got a glimpse of it this month when the coordinator, Trevor Jones, published one of the important maps that will undoubtedly be seen in the report.
WCS will undoubtedly define important elephant corridors throughout the country that link diverse protected areas. Allowing any animal populations great mobility increase the physical and genetic health of the species.
Jones is going to argue that very tiny corridors especially in the dead center of the country are essential to maintaining the health of the elephant populations.
Notice on the top left map Jones has placed arrows showing the most important corridors.
But these corridors fall directly over the country’s most productive agricultural regions. Note the map on the bottom left from the EU shows where Tanzania’s most productive agricultural lands are, right over Jones’ most important elephant corridors.
And while we may be waiting for Jones’ report, I doubt the voting farmers have to.
Earlier this year the Tanzanians were rebuffed by the world community when a plea to allow them to sell stockpiled ivory was narrowly defeated at the CITES convention in Doha. I robustly supported the Kenyan/U.S. initiative that managed the defeat.
My support for the Kenyan initiative was with the understanding allowing the sales would aggravate elephant poaching and because the case the Tanzanian officials made was terribly flawed, reeking of corruption. But the Tanzanian farmer is less worried about these issues than harvesting his pumpkins.
It was a shame that that important battle in Doha did not address the more serious human/elephant conflict which will now be addressed in the Tanzanian election.
Time and again men and women unable to foster human relationships create them with animals whose only ability to resist is to kill them in return.
