the fetish with neutral expressions. “The only thing remarkable about it is that it isn’t at all remarkable,” said Lorna. “You can find objects like this at shops all over East Africa. The use of animal parts from endangered species never stopped—it never even slowed down.”
In other words, while CITES proscriptions on wildlife products may carry quite a bit of weight in Europe, North America, and other regions of the developed world, they are not much of an issue in Kenya. The trade continues in tusks, lion claws, leopard skins, ape skulls—it’s simply illegal. And that is hardly a deterrent in Africa, Rian observes, given that game law enforcement remains nonexistent to spotty at best and is usually checked by bribery when it does occur. The average Kenyan gains nothing by obeying wildlife regulations, because he or she derives no benefit from observing such laws—a significant issue when annual per capita income is around sixteen hundred dollars. On the other hand, a tusk or serval pelt sold on the black market can provide a significant boost to family income, and a snared impala or speared warthog can represent something of equal value—meat, still a great luxury in protein-poor East Africa.
The 1977 Kenya Wildlife Conservation and Management Act and the 1989 CITES ivory ban were noble in intent, promising a modern retread of the Peaceable Kingdom: not just the lion lying down with the lamb, but also modern human beings lying down with the lion—and the elephant and rhino as well. Kenya, it seemed, could become the place where conservation would transcend itself, become something finer and higher, something rarefied and beautiful. It would become the place where wild animals wouldn’t simply be observed and appreciated; they would be loved.
But a critical component was not addressed in this equation: the people who actually share the land with the animals. In colonial times, conservation laws in East Africa tended to exclude tribal people. To a significant degree, not much has changed; ecotourism in Kenya caters to a wealthy foreign elite, with most of the revenues flowing to the tour companies and political cadres influential enough to seize a part of the action. The people who live with the game—the rural hoi polloi, the average pastoral tribal members who count their wealth in cows and goats—receive little or no recompense. In such a situation, it is no surprise that game regulations are viewed with suspicion, even disdain.
And yet, as Adams and McShane point out in The Myth of Wild Africa, many Africans cherish their wildlife heritage. Tanzania, one of the world’s poorest nations, has devoted almost 15 percent of its land to wildlife parks and reserves; that compares to less than 4 percent of land set aside for the same purpose in the United States. Julius Nyerere, the founder of modern Tanzania, established conservation as a priority in a 1961 speech presented at a conference on natural resources held in Arusha, a town that served as the main entrepôt for safari companies and hunters in the lands surrounding the Serengeti. Nyerere’s presentation became known as the Arusha Declaration of Wildlife Protection, and it set the tone for things to come in the emergent Tanzanian state: “The survival of our wildlife is a matter of grave concern to all of us in Africa. These wild creatures [and] the wild places they inhabit are not only important as a source of wonder and inspiration but are an integral part of our natural resources and our future livelihood and wellbeing. In accepting the trusteeship of our wildlife we solemnly declare that we will do everything in our power to make sure that our children’s grandchildren will be able to enjoy this rich and precious inheritance.”
It must be noted that Nyerere made a subtle distinction between conservation and animal advocacy. Wildlife, he observed, was something that warranted admiration; the game was beautiful, he implied, and deserved protection simply because beauty makes the world endurable. But he also emphasized that wildlife is a natural resource and a renewable one at that. In a country as poor as Tanzania, a resource so rich, so abundant, could not go unexploited. Just as Tanzanians had an obligation to protect wildlife, they also had a right to utilize it. And therein lies the difference between Tanzania and Kenya; in Kenya, the obligation to protect wildlife is acknowledged, but there is no option for legitimately utilizing it.
As of this writing, drought has again blighted northern Kenya. The forage has withered, and the herds that sustain the region’s pastoral tribes have been decimated. People are dying of hunger. Hit particularly hard are the Turkana, a herding tribe with ancestral lands in the northwest corner of the nation. For a Turkana pastoralist whose cattle have perished, whose children are wasting away before his eyes, who lives in a brushwood banda and has no nearby source of water or fuel, the idea of an inviolate wildlife refuge seems an absurdity. On the other hand, this same man likely would support a reserve that would accommodate regulated grazing and firewood collecting, furnish small stipends derived from tourists or hunters, or even provide occasional rations of meat from wildlife culls. To abide in the Peaceable Kingdom, after all, one must have a full belly; otherwise, the lion will be killed and the lamb devoured.
CHAPTER 4
From Automata to Sentient Beings
The animal rights movement originated in western Europe and its colonies, reaching back to the seventeenth century. In 1635, an ordinance was passed in Ireland that prohibited pulling the wool off sheep or attaching plows to horses’ tails, deeming such activities unnecessarily cruel. In 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony prohibited “Tirrany or Cruelty toward any bruite Creature which are usually kept for man’s use.” Under Oliver Cromwell, laws were passed in England that discouraged the blood sports dearly loved by the hoi polloi, including cockfights, dogfights and bullbaiting.
Such initial attempts to imbue animals with certain rights may seem tepid by today’s standards; indeed, these regulations mostly dealt with domesticated animals, creatures generally considered essential to human welfare. Wildlife, as a whole, was still considered vermin or proper subjects for hunting, either for the larder or as a gentleman’s pursuit. Still, tentative as these initial forays may seem, they were revolutionary in their own quiet way, in that they ran against the prevailing philosophical mode of the era. By habit, the common ruck viewed animals as property, food, or objects for amusement, scorn, or ire. Intellectuals generally accorded with Descartes, whose rigorous mechanism excluded animals as reasoning beings, categorizing them as biological automata.
But the nascent concept of animal rights gained credence when Rousseau published his Discourse on Inequality in 1754. Here, he argued that animals are integral to natural law—and hence have inherent rights—because they are sentient; they are capable of perception, of emotional response, and, most pertinently, of suffering. To Rousseau, the power of ratiocination doesn’t even enter into the argument. For Cartesians, to think is to be. For Rousseau, to feel is sufficient to establish a claim to the rights inherent to existence: “For it is clear that, being destitute of intelligence and liberty, [animals] cannot recognize . . . [natural] law: as they partake, however, in some measure of our nature, in consequence of the sensibility with which they are endowed, they ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes . . . this is less because they are rational than because they are sentient beings.”
Rousseau notwithstanding, the English and Irish established themselves as the most ardent champions of animal rights. Attempts in Parliament to pass laws forbidding bullbaiting and wanton cruelty to cattle and horses were quashed with much attending ridicule in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, but in 1822, Richard “Humanity Dick” Martin, the MP for Galway in Ireland, gained passage of the Ill Treatment of Horses and Cattle Bill, which forbade wanton cruelty to these large domesticated beasts. The act was strengthened by an amendment in 1835, which extended the cruelty ban to dogs, bears, and sheep and also proscribed bearbaiting and cockfighting; by another amendment in 1849, which increased the fines for animal abuse; and by a final adjustment in 1876, which placed limits on animal experimentation. Following the British lead, France and the United States also passed laws forbidding cruelty to animals.
But these early laws were hardly enforced with zealotry or obeyed with punctilio by the general population. In 1824, the Society for the Prevention
