Africa's wildlife is being loved to death. Kenya's much-praised ban on hunting, in fact, has had an
impact opposite to its intent: wild animals are disappearing
at an accelerating rate. "Charismatic
megafauna" -- elephants, lions, rhinos, the larger antelopes -- are in a true death spiral.
When Kenya's hunting ban was passed in 1977 in response to the "Ivory Wars" that were ravaging the
nation's elephants, it was hailed as a new and progressive paradigm for wildlife management. With the
hunting pressure off, animal lovers opined, the game would bounce back. And it's true that elephants
did recover modestly over the ensuring two decades.
But now the
slaughter has begun anew, driven by an unrelenting demand from a prosperous Asia
for ivory objets d'art. Meanwhile, everything else is going down the tubes, including carnivores and
antelopes. By best estimates, Kenya's wildlife has declined by more than
70 percent over the past 20
years.
What happened? While the ban played well in the developed world, it was catastrophic for the people
who lived in the rural hinterlands of Kenya -- the places where wildlife actually exists. Basically, folks out
in the bush had the responsibility for maintaining wildlife on their lands, but they were deprived of any
benefit from the animals. Such a
situation is intolerable for subsistence pastoralists and farmers.
Subsequent to the ban, they could not respond -- legally -- when an elephant raided their maize and
stomped their goats, or when a lion killed a cow. But laws made in Nairobi are seldom if ever applied
with rigor in the Kenyan bush. Even as animal rights groups lionized Kenya's no-kill policy and
urged its
adoption across Africa, the killing has continued unabated. Carnivores are poisoned, antelope snared,
elephants speared and shot: Crops can thus be raised and the livestock grazed in peace.
Michael Norton-Griffiths, who has served as the senior ecologist for Tanzania's Serengeti National
Park and the manager of the Eastern Sahel Program for the International Union for the Conservation of
Nature,
likened the situation to owning a goat.
Assume, says Norton-Griffiths, that you're a poor pastoralist in rural Kenya, and your assets consist of
a goat. You can eat this goat, or milk it. You can sell it, gaining hard currency that you can use to buy
necessities. Or you can breed it, increasing your asset base in the form of another goat.
But now imagine that a law is passed that forbids you to eat, sell, or breed that goat. In fact, the only
thing you can do with it is allow tourists to take pictures of it. Even then, you obtain no benefit; the
money derived from the tourists photographing the goat goes to the owner of the "eco-lodge" they are
patronizing.
By substituting wildlife for the goat, says Norton-Griffiths, you have the situation that exists in Kenya
today.
If African wildlife is to survive -- let alone thrive -- local people must value it. In other words, they must
be allowed to gain both income and meat from it in a sustainable fashion. And repugnant as it may
seem to most urbanized westerners, lion, buffalo and elephant hunting
can be sustainable enterprises --
like most large African mammals, these species are fecund. Wealthy hunters will pay between $50,000 to $100,000 to take a trophy male lion or elephant bull, and up to $20,000 for a buffalo with big horns.
If that money is returned to local communities -- along with the meat -- then tolerance for wildlife
reflexively improves.
Similarly, the commercial cropping of certain species of plains game for hides and meat (Burchell's
zebra most specifically) can build support for conservation among Africa's pastoral and agricultural
communities.
This isn't to say hunting is a panacea for Africa's wildlife crisis. Kenya's wildlife stocks currently are
too depleted to allow any kind of "consumptive" game policy. Tanzania has larger populations of
wildlife than Kenya, and both trophy and subsistence hunting are allowed -- but the game is dwindling.
Over-hunting due to poor enforcement of the quotas and general government corruption is widely
acknowledged as a contributing factor.
But a template for a rational wildlife policy exists: in Namibia. By the late 1980s, wildlife was
almost wholly extirpated from this vast southwestern African territory following decades of conflict
between South Africa and the
Southwest Africa People's Organization (SWAPO). Following Namibia's
independence from South Africa in 1990, the leaders of the new nation established wildlife policies that
invested tribal communities with control over the game, while simultaneously establishing firm quotas
for individual species. Income from both hunting and cropping is rigorously tracked, and diligently
returned to the communities.
Namibian wildlife, in short, was changed from a liability to an asset. Today, Namibia is
burgeoning with
wildlife, game and non-game species alike. The country has the
world's largest population of cheetahs.
Elephants are abundant -- in some places too abundant -- and lions are returning. Rare antelopes such
as kudu and sable are anything but rare in Namibia; their meat, the yield of certified cropping programs,
is easily found in supermarkets.
Obviously, this would not be possible without relatively good governance. In the 2011 corruption
index for 182 countries released by Transparency International,
Namibia ranked 57th and Kenya was
close to the bottom at 154. If Kenya is to duplicate Namibia's success, it must address its rampant
corruption as well as revamp its game laws.
Still, Namibia points to a better way than the blanket no-hunt policy that has become holy writ among
some animal rights groups. And it's better because it's pragmatic: It addresses the needs of people as
well as the rights of animals. Unlike Kenya's current wildlife policy, it actually works.
While farmers defending their crops are called poachers, rich white people killing for amusement are perceived conservationists. It is a racist, socially unjust concept which alienates local people from conservation and puts extra hunting pressure on wildlife. The only ones gaining from these schemes are the NGOs running them. It was proved that conservation money is not divided justly and hardly reach the farmers at the bottom of the pyramid of corrupt/inefficient megaprojects. How many times does it have to be proven again, how many animals will get slaughtered by then?
There is another type of conservation, it is called Community Conservation and it believes that local people are willing and able to protect nature. They don’t do it for money but because they understand the dangers of ecological destruction, see that their fauna disappearing and feel for it. Unfortunately, although conservation efforts dedicated to support local people’s conservation initiatives have proven to be successful, they are barely heard of. These projects are inherently small scale and use low budgets. These projects are marginalized by big conservation operators who prefer to show that conservation is highly expensive.
(*Shoot-to-kill-poacher policy is differentiated from returning fire in a live skirmish with poachers to save one's own life or the life of fellow law enforcement officers. The latter whilst still potentially lethal, is within the bounds of law and understood as the outcome of an ambush or firefight with equally armed poachers.)
Kenya’s healthy approach to conservation as a value does not ignore economics. It simply says- Our elephants are worth more alive. Eco-tourism brings more money to Kenya than allowing some white-guys to come and kill endangered wildlife for fun.
After dedicating nine years of my life to fighting wildlife criminals in Central Africa, and after getting hundreds of big traffickers behind bars in several African countries, I can tell you that what we need in this battle is to get rid of the price-tags that drive wildlife to extinction rather than to encourage the creation of new ones.
As an anti-corruption activist I would say that your TI corruption ranking comparison between Kenya and Namibia collapses ones you put Zimbabwe and the others into your tablet. Corruption is exactly what ensures that your formula – kill wildlife-get$-put $ into conservation-save wildlife – remains an illusion.
You want to save wildlife? Stop counting dollars and start counting jailed traffickers.
It is human nature to protect those things that we benefit from. This is why, in my opinion, the best way to protect wildlife is to create programs that allow those who must deal with the realities of living with wildlife to benefit from their presence, even if it means charging a few white guys $50,000.00 for the chance to hunt a big animal. That kind of money can mean the difference between buying additional food during a drought (or when the local wildlife destroys your crops) and losing more children to malnutrition.
A drug dealer is also a poor guy just trying to feed his family but we decided as a society that dealing cocaine is just not a legitimate “livelihood”.
Much of the hunting money ends up in the hands of corrupt officials rather than getting to villagers and Tanzania and Zimbabwe offer the most recent scandals in a long list of examples.
Being on the front-line of the fight against the illegal trade that drives elephants rhinos and apes to extinction, I can say that our problem is not the average farmer living next to an elephant population. It’s organized crime we are dealing with here and its not generated by poverty but by the rich and powerful.
actually, I´m not sure about the origin of your population estimation of 900 elephants. If you may have a look at the webpage of Tsavo’s elephant researchers, you will find the following numbers:
In the late 1960s, approximately 35,000 elephants roamed in the Tsavo region. Later, in the early 1970s estimated 6.000 elephants died in due to a drought in the region. In the next 4 years, weakened females and young elephants died probably because of low rainfall and the resulting lack of vegetation. There is no estimated number of dead female and/or young elephants mentioned on this page but it is obvious that it can not be a high number like the missing 18.000.
http://www.tsavoelephants.org/history
Very interesting to your post, the publication of Thouless et al. (2008), which describes the status of Kenya´s elephants in detail. Here you will find estimated and proved elephant population numbers for Kenya, including the historic ones. For the period in Tsavo area, you are highlighting in your post, you will read: „Cobb (1976) described the abundance and distribution of elephants and large herbivores within the ecosystem between 1973 and 1974 and estimated that almost 35.000 elephants were then present, suggesting either that Laws’s (1969) estimate was too low or that elephants had migrated into the park since 1967.“ Comparing to this publication, your population number of 900 elephants left in Tsavo in 1973 seems to be far too low.
So much for the good intentions of western bunny-huggers.