Kenya: Review Ban On Game Hunting

The Nation (Nairobi)
OPINION
March 26, 2007
Laurence Frank
Nairobi

Kenya has squandered its most important resource: 70 per cent of our wildlife has disappeared in the last 30 years. The animals have been strangled in snares by the millions, to be sold as 'nyama' in rural and urban butcheries.

Even in our national parks, many species are in serious decline due to poaching and habitat destruction on their boundaries; even the lions and other large predators which attract tourists to our parks are being speared and poisoned into extinction.

In that same 30 years, South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe have seen an immense increase in wildlife numbers, as thousands of cattle ranches have been turned back to wildlife production (sadly, much of Zimbabwe's regained wildlife was snared after 'land reform'). Wildlife continues to do very well in Tanzania and Botswana.

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE COLLAPSE of wildlife in of Kenya while it has increased enormously in the southern countries? Human populations have grown in most countries, so that does not explain the difference.

One difference is that in those countries, wildlife outside of parks has great value for sport hunting, whereas in Kenya wild animals are just a costly and expensive nuisance to the rural people who share the land with them. Kenya banned trophy hunting in 1977, just as landowners and communities in southern Africa found that their land was worth far more when producing wildlife for high paying foreign hunters than it was for cattle.

With 250,000 square kilometres outside of parks maintained for hunting, Tanzania has more wildlife than any country in Africa and income from trophy hunting is a mainstay of the national economy. Kenya's policy, which denies rural people any benefit from wildlife ensures people resent animals for damaging their crops, eating their livestock, and occasionally killing people.

To a rural Kenyan, it makes sense to eat the game and kill the predators, because they gain nothing from, and lose a lot to wild animals. In other countries, well managed hunting brings money and development to rural areas.

How can a country without legal hunting see its wildlife spiral into extinction? The answer is bad policy that ensures that rural people resent wildlife, instead of profiting from it.

This tragic state of affairs has been maintained by foreign animal rights groups, which spend millions of pounds and dollars annually influencing Kenyan policy makers and the media to ensure that their destructive policies are maintained. These overseas groups apparently do not seem to care that millions of our animals are strangled miserably in snares, so long as none are shot for profit. They boast to their American and British supporters that there is no hunting in Kenya, not admitting that as a result there is little wildlife left in Kenya, either.

In North America, Europe, and southern Africa, properly managed hunting has greatly increased wildlife populations, because people value it - no species has ever gone extinct due to sport hunting, because it is in the hunters' interest to ensure large populations.

In fact, trophy hunters want only large old males, with impressive horns, tusks or manes, animals that are no longer needed to produce offspring.

IN BOTSWANA TODAY, VERY FEW male lions are shot every year, at a price of nearly Sh10 million each.

Fully half of that fee goes to the rural community in which the lion was taken, and another quarter goes to the Wildlife Department for conservation. In Botswana, that lion, and all the associated wildlife, are a source of immense income, to be valued and encouraged. In Kenya, that lion is only an expensive, cattle-killing nuisance, to be poisoned or speared and left to rot in the sun.

I believe that properly managed, hunting would benefit rural communities and landowners while increasing wildlife populations.

Dr Frank works on lion conservation project in Laikipia and Loitokitok.

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