CONSERVATION MODEL PROVES SUCCESSFUL

                                    IN PREVENTING LION EXTINCTION

Chyulu Hills, Kenya

A team of conservationists working under the wwwistration and support of the Ol Donyo Wuas Trust (ODWT) in southeastern Kenya has proven that their innovative conservation model is capable of preventing the local extinction of lions.  Their highly successful four-year pilot test was conducted on Mbirikani Group Ranch, a Maasai community-owned 300,000-acre tract of unprotected wilderness in the Amboseli-Tsavo ecosystem.

The team’s conservation model addresses a critical and pervasive need: how to halt the imminent and virtually certain extinction of lions in the wild, for which to date no other viable remedy has been found.  “Without an intervention in many parts of Africa as successful as this one,” says Dr. Laurence Frank, a member of the team, “free-roaming lions will disappear in virtually all of Africa – except in the very largest and best protected game parks -- in a very few years.  And I don’t know of another conservation model that has accomplished what this one has during its four-year pilot test: greatly diminishing the killing of lions by livestock owners while, at the same time, changing attitudes in a positive direction toward conservation.  The degree of success experienced so far – only four lions killed due to conflict in the past fifty months on Mbirikani versus at least sixty-five on the neighboring ranches -- constitutes a breakthrough in African conservation.”

The model is economics-based -- meaning it employs economic incentives (compensation for depredated livestock and wages for conservation-based jobs) and economic penalties (fines for violating mutually-agreed rules and reduced compensation for poor husbandry) -- and is driven by the recognition that living with wildlife at this time in history is not in the economic self-interest of the local Maasai people.  The model therefore seeks to better balance the economics of everyday life and at the same time reduce human-wildlife conflict through community-based initiatives, improved livestock husbandry, and environmental education programs. 

The four components of the model are (1) Community Game Scouts, providing infrastructure in the bush to reduce human-wildlife conflict and protect natural resources; (2) the Mbirikani Predator Compensation Fund (PCF), protecting lions (and cheetahs, leopards, and hyenas) by compensating livestock owners for economic loss when their domestic animals are killed by one of these predators; (3) Living With Lions (LWL), a program headed by Dr. Frank that provides essential scientific knowledge on the status of the local lion population and the cultural dynamics of resident human-wildlife conflict, enhances and expands upon the model’s existing initiatives (Lion Guardians), and imports prior conservation successes and educational tools from work in other areas of Africa; and (4) the Environmental Scouts Program, an environmental education project supplementing otherwise inadequate government-based teaching curricula, modeled upon the Boy Scouts of America.   

“Had we not created and implemented the Predator Compensation Fund when we did in 2003,” says Richard Bonham, chairman of Ol Donyo Wuas Trust, “the local lion population would have gone extinct in a matter of months.  Predator compensation and the rules and regulations we designed in collaboration with the local community, through intensive dialogue, have virtually stopped lion killing and shifted community attitudes progressively toward tolerance.  All of our efforts are now bearing fruit.”  Bonham shares two recent stories to illustrate his point.  “A young warrior I recently encountered on the group ranch did not recognize me, thinking I was a tourist.  His spear was bent and I said to him, “Did you bend that spear killing a lion?”  “Oh no,” the teenage boy replied, “We don’t kill lions here anymore.”  “Why not?” I asked.  “Because we get compensated when lions kill our livestock.”  Very recently a near lion killing did occur when a small group of warriors decided to defy the community’s will and go on a lion hunt.  Bonham recalls, “I received multiple calls from members of the community during the night -- even one from the brother of one of these warriors -- saying this lion hunt was about to happen and we must stop it.  We sent in our game scouts and Lion Guardians and the situation was resolved.  It is this form of self-regulation, resulting directly from the rules and mechanisms of our predator compensation program -- and the community’s unquestionable desire for predator compensation to continue -- that produces this kind of otherwise unheard-of result.”  On March 3, 2007, at a ranch-wide meeting of warriors and the Trust, Bonham was made patron of an association founded by the chief of the warriors of Mbirikani, the purpose of which is conservation.  Particularly, the big cats.  It is to be called the Maasai Moran Conservation Project.  “I am told that for six months these guys had been cooking this up,” says Bonham.  “They surprised me with this one, however, more positive and encouraging than I could have ever imagined.”  Richard Bonham’s twenty years of dedicated work with the local community, beginning with the planting of trees and the provision of scholarships, schools, teachers, and healthcare -- now culminating in the success of this conservation model -- is paying off.

Tom Hill, a trustee of ODWT and member of the team, who has been working on the ground with Bonham for the past six years, says, “Now that the base case has been proven -- that our model can virtually stop the killing of lions and change community attitudes toward predators and conservation more generally -- we must expand geographically, as fast as possible across the Amboseli-Tsavo ecosystem, or we will have won the battle but lost the war.  A lion that leaves our pilot test area and gets killed on a neighboring group ranch -- because that community doesn’t have this program -- is just as dead and brings us that much closer to an unsustainable lion population in this ecosystem.”  Hill adds, “But what is even more important than saving lions and the other great predators is to save the ecosystem itself; otherwise, we are simply moving chairs around on the deck of the Titanic.  The model we have proven – when fully extended -- has the greatest possible chance of keeping the ship itself afloat.  By expanding the scope of economic incentives and penalties – that is to say, the number of compensation-based solutions and conservation-related jobs – in order to address the full range of ecological threats to Amboseli-Tsavo  (water use, fencing, subdivision, grazing policy, size of livestock herd, lack of conservation areas, etc.), we can better balance the economic equation of living with wildlife to the benefit of the Maasai people and stabilize the ecosystem before it collapses.”

While the base-case conservation model (game scouts, predator compensation, and monitoring of the lion population) is being rolled-out to the remainder of Amboseli-Tsavo, a second, two-to-three-year phase of testing and development will continue on Mbirikani Group Ranch, the purpose of which is to extend the impact of the model and fine-tune its various components.  “Our efforts in phase two on Mbirikani are beginning to be felt,” Dr. Frank says.  “The challenges we will be addressing have to do with further empowerment, particularly among the warrior age group, and community education.  Our education initiatives will focus on the benefits of living with wildlife and how best to reduce human-wildlife conflict through better animal husbandry – better boma fences and better herding practices (resulting in less livestock left unattended in the bush at night).  Since early 2007 we have been extending and evolving the Trust’s initial simba scout component into the Lion Guardian program that will result in warriors not only tracking and protecting lions using sophisticated equipment, as they do now, but also educating their local communities and reducing conflict before it occurs, for example by helping find lost livestock before it is killed by predators, as well as using films and other techniques developed in the Laikipia Predator Project.”  Dr. Frank adds, “We will also be addressing the serious hyena problem here by studying how best to minimize their depredation of livestock and educating the community on how to benefit from our findings.  All of these initiatives are intended to reduce conflict even further and to reduce the existing level of compensation claims.  The benefits of that going forward are several: tolerance of predators will increase even more, beyond what compensation has already achieved; the reduction in claims means PCF is more efficient; and the more money available means more conservation-based jobs and higher wages for the local community.  The model becomes even more effective and cost-efficient.”

A PhD. paper written recently on Mbirikani Group Ranch (R. Groom) reveals that the local Maasai community presently receives less than one-fourth as much economic benefit from living with wildlife as the cost they pay each year in the form of disease transfer from wildlife to livestock; depredation by carnivores; competitive consumption of grass, water, and trees from herbivores; and human injury and death from dangerous mammals.  “Bill Clinton won the American presidency in 1992 with his campaign staff focused on the theme, “It’s the economy, stupid”,” says Hill.  “In our case, the equivalent theme, I suppose, would be, “It’s economics, stupid”.  The key to our breakthrough has been to listen to the local community and respond to their central desire: pay us for our depredated livestock and we will stop killing lions and other predators.  That’s essentially what we have done . . . but with real penalties and shared economic loss if and when self-regulation breaks down.   And by expanding upon that basic model – both geographically and in scope of ecological threats – we have the greatest possible chance in Africa today to stabilize and sustain not only the free-roaming lion but whole ecosystems as well.  The question is this: Are there potential partners in the First World who are prepared to join us?”