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| Saturday, 21 August 2004 |
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Nowhere to roam Wildlife reserves alone cannot protect big cats. A look at new ways to save them by Terry Mccarthy Laikipia, with Andrea Dorfman
The hindquarters are gone; the chest is laid bare. Dry, snapping noises can be heard across the grasslands as the animals crack the ribs of their prey to get to the vital organs. Coolly, with utter confidence, a mature lioness - the oldest of the seven-member pride-approaches. A 3-year-old male tries to scare her off with a snarl, but she lunges at him, baring her teeth and biting at his neck. After a modest show of resistance, he retreats and, in a final display of submission, turns tail and slinks off into the sunset. She takes his place at the kill, tearing chunks from the giraffe's neck. A jackal watches from a distance, hoping for a few scraps when the lions are done. Farther away, by a clump of trees, four adult giraffes wait in vain for their young one to return.
This is no photo op in a wildlife park for tourists on safari. This is Mugie Ranch, a commercial livestock operation in Kenya's Laikipia district, about six hours north of Nairobi. Some 14,000 sheep and 1,000 cattle graze here on the open grasslands, tended by 200 ranch hands. Barely a kilometre from the feasting lions, herders are bringing cattle and sheep into their nighttime pens, rising clouds of red dust. The herders whistle at their dogs, which are on the alert for lions and for leopards, which go to the nearby water hole at night to feed on antelope and gazelles. On the plains of Africa, predation is a prominent part of the daily rhythm of life. Livestock owners around the world generally kill predators, but the 18,000-hectare Mugie Ranch is trying something new. It is part of the Laikipia Predator Project, run by wildlife biologist Laurence Frank of the University of California, Berkely, who is seeking better ways for big cats and humans to coexist.
Frank hoped. If the big cats bring tourist dollars to Mugie Ranch, then both humans and lions come out ahead. The future of this spectacular species may depend on such experiments. Last year animal conservationists were caught catnapping when a new survey revealed a sharp and unexpected drop in Africa's lion population. While the cat-conservation world was worried about the fate of Asia's endangered tigers, lions-considered vulnerable but not endangered-were quietly slipping toward oblivion. Ten years ago, the species was thought to number as many as 100,000. But the new appraisal, made public last September and published in the journal Oryx in January by Hans Bauer of Leiden University and Sarel van der Merwe of the African Lion Working Group, was a paltry 23,000. More than half live in six protected areas, which is why tourists in Kenya's Masai Mara or South Africa's Kruger National Park can still see plenty of lions. But outside these megazoos, lions appear to be in alarming decline.
Why? For the same reasons that virtually all the world's big cats - tigers, cheetahs, snow leopards, jaguars and, to a lesser degree, cougars-are in trouble, reasons that have to do with the very nature of being a top cat in a world dominated by the top primate. Moreover, the reasons point to the limits - and ultimate failure- of the traditional strategy for safeguarding big cats: protecting them in wildlife reserves. Big cats, by nature, are territorial, live in low densities and hunt their prey over vast stretches of land (a tiger in the Russian Far East roams over 1,000 sq km, and a cheetah in Namibia will traverse 1,500 sq km). A wildlife reserve has to be huge to support such animals, and even large parks can con tain just so many of the fiercely territorial creatures. Big cats that roam or live outside reserves increasingly find themselves on turf staked out by farmers, herders and loggers, especially in parts of Africa and Asia where the human population is booming. Wild prey and cat-friendly habitat are scarce. Instead, the cats encounter humans who don't hesitate to use guns and poison to protect themselves and their livelihoods. Poachers only add to the cat catastrophe. "Clearly, protected areas alone are not the solution," says Joshua Ginsberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which is based at New York City's Bronx Zoo. In his recent book on large predators, Monster of God, naturalist David Quammen is equally pessimistic: "The last wild, viable, free-ranging populations of big flesh eaters will disappear sometime around the middle of the next century". Quammen argues that as the world's population continues to rise, alpha predators will be squeezed out. Courtesy: Time |
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In the thick golden light of a setting African Sun, under the speckled
shade of an acacia tree, three young lions are feasting on a baby giraffe.
