Once there were

lions

We have just recapturedLion Male 93. a brotherof his has been missingfor weeks. LM 93 islucky to be alive. His

radio collar prevented a new wire snarefrom tightening around his neck, and atlength he broke free. The wire rubbed hisneck raw, but did not strangle him out-right. Nor did it become embedded inhis neck, like the noose on that lioness afew years ago. We could not dart herbefore the festering wire killed her.

When we captured Striped HyenaFemale 06, a snare had been buried inthe flesh of her neck for so many yearsthat we had to chisel away a solid ring ofbone-like calcification to remove the wireand clean the wound. She recovered andhas since had several litters.

Snares are slow, hideous; poison isfast. Spears are faster still, and bullets killquickest of all. Africa’s great predators aredisappearing, yet hardly anyone is payingattention. Not long ago, conservationistsestimated there to be well over 100,000lions in Africa. Today, the best estimate isof the order of just 23,000, perhaps halfof which are breeding adults, the greatmajority in national parks and reserves.There are perhaps 15,000 cheetahs, per-haps 5,000 wild dogs. We have no ideahow many hyenas exist, but they, too, arebeing poisoned into extinction.

Even the lions of Maasailand are dis-appearing. While the Maasai might oncehave been natural conservationists,young men with spears have reduced to ahandful the lions of Nairobi NationalPark. Until a few years ago, both lionsand hyenas were common in the ChyuluHills between the Amboseli and TsavoNational Parks. Poisoning and spearinghas decimated that population. The sameis happening in Tanzania’s NgorongoroConservation Area. And there have beenpoisoning incidents in the Mara.

While all African wildlife is dwin-dling, the large predators are especiallyvulnerable as they kill livestock. Histo-rically, herders lacked the technology torid themselves of predators: it took theEuropeans millennia to get rid of lions,wolves and bears. With better technolo-gy this took two centuries in easternNorth America, and just a few decades in

the American West. Twenty years ago,large carnivores were still abundant inKenya and much of eastern Africa, butwith cheap and effective poisons and theubiquitous AK-47, Africa’s predatorsmay largely disappear in our lifetimes.Traditional African livestock husbandryis well adapted to protecting livestockfrom predators, but bullets and poisonwill always be cheaper and simpler thaneven the simplest preventative measures.

For decades, conservationists havebeen raising the alarm about elephants,rhinos and gorillas. Why the silence,then, when predator populations are infreefall? There are several reasons. First,predators are doing well in protectedareas: a tourist can go to almost any parkin Africa and see a dozen lions on anafternoon’s game drive (Nairobi Park is arecent, appalling exception). What thetourist does not see is that outside theparks the predators are almost gone.

Secondly, elephant and rhino carcass-es are obvious; in the 1970s the worldwas horrified by images showing wholegroups of dead elephants, rotting hulkswith their faces hacked off. Predators diequietly in the bush and are rarely seen byhumans. Who ever finds the leopardskeleton with the snare still tangled in itscervical vertebrae? Or the rotting carcassesof a dozen poisoned hyenas, surroundedby those of scores of poisoned vultures?Where are all the photographers whengangs of frenzied morani spear a litter oflion cubs?

And finally, where are the conserva-tion groups that should be shouting fromthe rooftops? Not long ago, when I triedto light a fire under the biggest of themall, the simple reply was: “We are puttingall our emphasis on programmes focusedon tigers, elephants, rhinos, whales anddolphins, mountain gorillas, and giantpandas.” In other words, we shall go onselling to the public what we have alwayssold, because we know what sells. Let’snot confuse donors with more bad news.

The result, in a very few years, is thatlions will be like those rhinos, gorillas,tigers and pandas: isolated populations innational parks, far too small to be genet-ically viable, and dependent on intensiveprotection and constant human manipu-lation. Big zoos.

Africa’s vanishing large predators may soon exist only in ourmemories, warns conservation biologist Laurence G Frank.

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If predators are still abundant in parks,why worry about them outside protectedareas? These are wide ranging animals, andfew parks are large enough to provide ade-quate protection. When a pride of lionswanders beyond park boundaries on toovergrazed rangeland devoid of wildlife, itresorts to feeding on goats or cattle. Unlessparks are immense, the home ranges ofmost predators will extend across bound-aries, exposing them to the temptations oflivestock, with the inevitable consequences.

In many ‘protected areas’, such as theMaasai Mara, cattle are allowed to grazewithin the reserve, and when the reserve’spredators kill the trespassing cattle, theherdsmen spear them in retribution. Parkboundary zones are very often infested withsnares set for game animals; snaring aroundthe edges of the Serengeti exacts a fearfultoll on spotted hyenas from throughoutthat Park, as they follow the migratingherds of zebra and wildebeest.

Parks are insecure for another reason:the political instability plaguing Africathreatens wildlife as well as humans. Howmany African parks have been cleared ofanimals on being overrun by hungry armiesor refugees? Wildlife populations built upover many years of protection withinZimbabwe’s conservancies were destroyedin just a few months of intensive snaringafter the government there turned the land

over to ‘freedom fighters’.Even if animals were secure in parks, we

should still face the eventual loss of thesespecies, as few parks are sufficiently large topreserve genetic diversity over long periods.Without a continual exchange of genes,doom through inbreeding is the inevitablefate of all such tiny, isolated populations.Moreover, small populations are vulnerableto disease, such as the canine distempervirus that killed one-third of the Serengeti’slions in the early 1990s, and that regularlywipes out populations of African wild dogs.

For all these reasons, it is vital to retainviable wildlife populations outside andbetween protected areas, lest parks becomeislands in seas of humanity whereon allnaturally wide-ranging species are doomedto eventual extinction. Without geneticinterchange, it will become necessary tomove animals continually between parks, alevel of intervention probably not feasiblein any but the most affluent of countries.

Despite hysterical recent press coverage,one thing not threatening lions is the FelineImmunodeficiency Virus (‘lion Aids’).Wild cats and hyenas have been living withthis harmless virus for millions of years.Studies of their immune systems are there-fore of interest in seeking a cure for HIV,precisely because there is no evidence thatthe closely related predator virus harms itsanimal hosts.

Amazingly, almost no research has beendone on ways of fostering coexistencebetween lions and livestock outside parks.So we still know almost nothing about thebehaviour and ecology of African predatorsin human-dominated landscapes, livingunder severe pressure from humans.Instead, nearly all of the research to datehas been on the basic biology of protectedpopulations in parks.

Since 1997, the Laikipia PredatorProject has been addressing both issues.The Laikipia District of Kenya is unique inthat wildlife populations, including thoseof predator species, are stable or increasing,rather than disappearing; Laikipia producesmore lions than the ecosystem can absorb.Although there are no formally protectedareas, the semi-arid ecosystem is virtuallyintact on the well-managed rangeland ofLaikipia’s commercial ranches, which hostthe full array of native wildlife.

But this is livestock country, and thepredators take a significant toll on cattle,sheep, goats and camels. And, while thepredators feed very largely on wild prey, weestimate that it costs ranchers about US$350 annually in livestock to tolerate a lionin the area, perhaps US$ 35 for a spottedhyena, with both leopards and cheetahssomewhere in between. With income fromeco-tourism and a strong conservationethic, Laikipia’s commercial ranchers are

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willing to absorb considerable depredationcosts, but lions that habitually kill cattle orsheep must eventually be shot.

To a pastoralist, such livestock losses area much more serious blow, so tolerance islower in the communal areas inhabited bythe Laikipiak Maasai. Lions do not survivelong on most group ranches, and have beeneliminated throughout most of northernKenya. In such areas, hyena depredation onsheep and goats is now the most commonform of human-wildlife conflict.

Although lions have largely disappearedoutside parks elsewhere, the Laikipia popu-lation is holding its own, or increasing.Lions can reproduce at 20 % annually ingood conditions; in Laikipia conditions areexcellent. Yet the annual lion surplus hasnowhere to go, as people on lands sur-rounding Laikipia are hostile to predators;zoos already have more lions than they canhandle, and translocation (as we shall see) isnot an option.

Some shooting is thus unavoidable inLaikipia, but informed management couldminimise lion reproduction, lion shootingand livestock losses. There is still essentiallyno lion management anywhere except inSouth Africa. Our goal is to make pas-trolists more tolerant in Kenya’s vast north,so the surplus Laikipia lions (and otherwild species) can start recolonising thatemmense denuded landscape.

To gather data on the numbers andmovements of Laikipia’s lions, we fit themwith radio collars. But, unlike park lions,these animals are wary and nocturnal. Wehad to devise novel ways of capturing them.We have so far collared and released morethan 100 lions in Laikipia. Through aerialradio tracking, we have found that theystick closely to the commercial ranches,where they are (relatively) safe, hardly everstraying on to the communal lands wherethere are too many people and livestock,and where wild prey is scarce and poison iswidely used. Even on the commercialranches, some 20 % of the lions are killedannually, always in response to livestockdepredation. And habitual livestock killershave a very short life expectancy.

Predators are notoriously hard to count,but we estimate a population of perhaps120 adult and sub-adult lions in the 7,000-km2 Laikipia rangelands. For the most part,they live in small groups of pairs of femalesand their cubs, while males come and gobetween the groups.

Research I have done with MordecaiOgada and Rosie Woodroffe shows thattraditional African livestock husbandrymethods offer quite effective protectionagainst predators. This is not surprising inthat these traditions have developed overmillennia in response to the twin threats ofpredators and human raiders. Livestock in

East Africa is closely herded by day andconfined in thornbush bomas at night,quite unlike Europe and North America,where cattle are simply left to graze in alandscape from which predators have beeneliminated.

Lions usually kill cattle by stampedingthem out of the bomas at night, so the keyto preventing losses is to build strongenclosures with thick walls and stout gatesable to withstand the pressure of panickedcows. Predators are less likely to approachbomas where there are lots of people. Sobomas where several herdsmen live alongwith their families are safer than smallerones attended by just one man. Alert dogswarn herdsmen of prowling lions, and ashot in the air is usually enough to chase offthe lions; a strong light too will generallydiscourage them. But dogs have their dis-advantages: herders may also use them forhunting wildlife, and they may carry dis-eases that can decimate wild carnivores,especially the African wild dog.

None of these measures is expensive,and all are certainly cheaper than the loss ofa few cattle. Well-managed ranches, bycontrast, suffer relatively little depredationand need to kill only a few problem lions.

Communally-owned group ranches inLaikipia are embracing eco tourism, withhelp from the neighbouring commercialranches and various NGOs. But tourists

Vanishing breed? Lions, while stillfaring well on some private ranches inLaikipia (above and facing page), haveall but disappeared from other non-protected areas in East Africa.

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want to see wildlife, especially lions. Sothese nascent ventures are caught in a dou-ble bind: their traditional economy is basedon livestock, which is threatened by preda-tors, yet they want to participate in a neweconomy based on tourism, which (to besuccessful) requires predators. We hope, bystrengthening traditional livestock manage-ment practices, that we can help the localpeople to realise both goals.

There are very few lions today in thecommunal areas of Laikipia, and mostwildlife-related problems come from spot-ted hyenas. On commercial ranches, lossesto hyenas are rare, usually occurring onlywhen livestock stray during the day and donot make it back to the boma at night; dili-gent herding prevents straying. In thecommunal areas, strays are rarely left out atnight, presumably because people herdingtheir own stock are more conscientious.However, hyenas come around the villagesnightly looking for scraps of bone or hide,and occasionally force their way in throughboma gates to kill small stock. The gate isthe weak point, merely a bush stuffed intoan opening in the thornbush walls.

On the Laikipia group ranches, wherewe are experimenting with various simplealternatives, we have found that low costsolar-powered electric fences effectivelyexclude hyenas. Much cheaper and almostas effective, a solid gate can be constructedfor a few dollars’ worth of timber and sheetmetal, or fabricated from branches at nocost. We are now working with the LaikipiaWildlife Forum and the Kenya WildlifeService to have demonstration predator-proof bomas put up among all LaikipiaMaasai communities.

Of course, some pastoralists are stillnomadic, using several bomas in the courseof a year, and thornbush is not always avail-able. For these people, we also need toexperiment with ‘living bomas’ – densehedges of native bush species.

Most people in Africa hate hyenas, eventhough they take relatively small numbersof livestock, and even when such losses areeasily prevented. Big cats kill many morelivestock animals, yet many of the Maasaiexpress admiration for them: beautifulblondes can always get away with murder.

Improved boma construction, whilereducing depredation by hyenas, will also

make livestock more secure against attackby lions. A resurgent lion population wouldbe a great boon for tourism on the groupranches. Some group ranches have alreadyset aside land for exclusive use by wildlife,and increased tourism would accelerate thisprocess. Removing goats, meanwhile, hasthe huge added benefit of allowing grass onovergrazed rangeland to recover.

Some leopards occasionally becomechronic livestock killers. Yet they are soagile it can be hard to prevent a determinedleopard from getting into a boma. In recentyears, people have become increasinglyreluctant to kill cats, and so they oftenresort instead to translocating problemleopards (and lions) to national parks.Unfortunately, even ‘humane’ cage trapsare very hard on the trapped animal – leop-ards very often break canine teeth and ripout claws trying to escape. Such an animalis then released in a foreign area, badlyhandicapped in its ability to feed anddefend itself. And self-defence is critical, aspredators are highly territorial and intoler-ant of strangers – a fact often ignored bythe translocation practice.

Game wardens and conservationiststend to dump the caged animal and then gohome with a fuzzy, warm feeling of having

‘saved’ a life, ignorant of the fact that thetranslocated leopard, lion, or hyena, is thenpersecuted by existing territory holders inthe new area. It tries to find its way home,often killing livestock along the way. Forchronic problem predators, it is far morehumane to eliminate them outright than tokill them slowly through translocation.Moving predators works only if they can bereleased into an area that has no populationof the same species, and where any newhuman neighbours will also tolerate them.

Although newly fenced reserves arespringing up all over South Africa and arebeing stocked with translocated predators,there are no such predator-free protectedareas in East Africa.

While it is not expensive to protect live-stock properly from predators, bullets andpoison will always be cheaper. Unless wildanimals have a positive financial value,killing them is always going to be easierthan living with them. How can we getlocal people to value the animals that eattheir livestock (or, in the case of elephants,destroy their crops)? Should conservation-ists share the costs of tolerating predatorsand other problem animals? Due to cor-

Dr Laurence G Frank of the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying large predatorsin Kenya since 1971. He spent 20 years studying the behavioural ecology and endocrinology ofthe spotted hyena in the Maasai Mara. In 1997, he turned to conservation research in Laikipia,where he now directs the Laikipia Predator Project, a multidisciplinary study of the conservationbiology and management of large African predators outside protected areas. He has a BA fromReed College in the US, an MSc from the University of Aberdeen, and a Ph.D from Berkeley.

Ill-stared predators: Lions and hyenasthat naturally wander outside secureparks and reserves are particularlyvulnerable in that both kill livestockanimals and so become the targetsof revenge killings, often by spearingor the use of poison.

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ruption and abuse, financial compensationwas abandoned years ago in Kenya, but inthe Chyulu Hills Richard Bonham hasdevised a compensation system combiningcareful corroboration of claims with incen-tives for good livestock husbandry andprotection of predators. Will this systemreverse the decline in lion numbers? Weshall know in a few years.

Can tourism alone pay the way forAfrica’s wildlife? Tourism is a notoriouslyfickle industry (witness all the recent warn-ings concerning travel to Kenya), and evenat the best of times tourist numbers arelimited, as indeed is the land area theyrequire. Many of us find the thought ofshooting a magnificent animal repulsive,but trophy hunters require vast areas ofabundant wildlife and can bring enormousamounts of money into a local economy.They also seem less sensitive to politicalinstability then ordinary tourists: tourismlong ago collapsed in Zimbabwe, but sporthunting is still going strong.

Killing animals to save them seemscounterintuitive, but it still takes a healthyproductive population to produce a fewlarge trophy male lions or elephants.Hunting was banned in Kenya 26 yearsago, since which time the country’s wildlifenumbers have fallen by more than 50 %;indeed, wild animals have only nuisancevalue to all but the relatively few peoplewho work in tourism.

Every year in Laikipia, many problemlions are shot and left to rot after killingcattle. These animals will die in any case,but trophy hunters would pay up to US$30,000 apiece to shoot them. Should wecharge hunters high prices to remove ourproblem predators? That sort of moneywould pay for a lot of dead cattle, and leaveplenty over for conservation. Would suchincome lead local people to tolerate someloss of livestock, or would it just guaranteethat every lion suddenly became a problemanimal, resulting in destruction of theentire population?

Commercial hunting has triggered aresurgence of wildlife in South Africa andNamibia. And many of Zimbabwe’s cattleranches, too, were converted into huntingconservancies. Could high-priced huntingconvince rural Kenyans to allow wildlifenumbers to recover? Could a new govern-ment inheriting a forty-year legacy ofcorruption regulate a lucrative huntingindustry enabling local people to benefitand wildlife populations to pick up? Wecannot know until the experiment is tried.All we do know is that, right now, the ani-mals are disappearing – fast.

Our fascination with animals capa-ble of having us for lunch is thesubject of David Quammen’s new

book, Monster of God: The Man-EatingPredator in the Jungles of History andthe Mind. Despite its lurid title, there areno gruesome photographs or breathlessaccounts of men conquering viciousbeasts. This is an elegantly craftedcombination of history, biology, sociology,anthropology, and adventure that raisesprovocative questions.

Quammen draws on the Biblical storyof Job and the Leviathan (theoriginal ‘monster of God’), theBeowulf saga, Paleolithic caveart and the movie Aliens todemonstrate the “psychologi-cal, mythic and spiritualdimensions” of alphapredators, which havealways served to keep us“acutely aware of ourmembership within thenatural world.”

In other words,Quammen’s book isabout hunger: both thehunger of a predator fora kill and the hunger ofthe human spirit forcommunion withsomething greater – inthe most primalsense – than ourselves.

Quammen is a superb science writer.He is the author of The Song of the Dodo(1996), a lucid explanation of conserva-tion biology [reviewed in SWARA 23:2],and of three earlier collections of natureand science essays. Monster of Godfocuses on four man-eaters: Asiatic lions,Australian saltwater crocodiles,Romanian brown bears, and Siberiantigers.

“Dentition is destiny,” Quammenwrites, in launching into a discussion ofcarnivores’ teeth and takedown strate-gies. For the record, great white sharkshave 26 upper teeth and 24 lower, tigers

and lions deliver a suffocating bite to thethroat, crocodiles use a ‘death roll’ todrown their victims, and scientists arestill arguing over just how sabre-toothedcats actually used their sabre teeth.

Its meticulously researched scienceaside, Monster of God is laced withmemorable travel tales. In India, abiologist tells of falling asleep whilewatching lions tear apart a deer; butinstead of becoming their dessert, he isawakened by a cub innocently curled upon his legs.

Quammen runs into a bush-dwellingAustralian taxidermist who pickles gamycrocodile heads (recipe included) forHell’s Angels. In Siberia, he joins a tigerstakeout using the remains of a biolo-gist’s dog as bait. (The carcass isbooby-trapped with firecrackers to dis-courage the tiger from any further acts ofFidocide.)

Quammen’s focus on local people isthis book’s greatest strength. He asksIndian cattle-herders, AustralianAborigines, Romanian shepherds, andRussian trappers: How do you feel aboutman-eaters when you’re the one who

might get eaten? A twice-mauledIndian insists,

“There’s noth-ing wrong withthe animal,”while the motherof a crocodile’svictim wails,“Who’ll give meback my son?”

ThroughoutMonster of God,Quammen stressesthat our planet’sresident monstersare in serious trouble.He predicts that by2150 all man-eatingpredators will havevanished from the wild,forced into oblivion bythe juggernaut of humanpopulation growth.

His final point is poignant and sober-ing. Just as man-eaters are keystonespecies in their environment, serving avital regulatory role by keeping preyspecies in check, he suggests they arealso the keystone species of the humanpsyche. If the great predators vanishfrom the wilderness, the landscapes ofour imaginations will be the poorer.

“A forest without bears,” writesQuammen “is empty.” For, by losing wildpredators, we shall also be losing some-thing of ourselves.

MONSTER OF GODThe Man-Eating Predator in theJungles of History and the Mind

by David Quammen

W W Norton, 2003ISBN 0-393-05140-4515 pp., US$ 26.95

Reviewed by Pamela S Turner

The soul of thealpha predator

REVIEW