and blood-crazed neocolonials trying to insinuate themselves back into a country from which they were properly ejected during a war of liberation has resonated dramatically in urban Kenya. Kenyans may not be deeply invested in the doctrine of animal rights, but the injustices of white colonialism still rancor, and big game hunting remains the preeminent symbol of the colonial era.
Thus, the basic conversation on African conservation is changing, driven by new media and reflecting the changing concepts of environmentalism in the world at large. The “old” science-based approach to conservation—dispassionate, data-driven, focused on habitat and suites of species rather than on narratives that anthropomorphize individual animals—is under dire threat. Its adversary is a New Environmentalism founded on the “deep ecology” philosophy articulated a generation ago by the Norwegian mountaineer Arne Naess, but it diverges from Naess’s original doctrine of planetary health in that it focuses on a single component of ecological well-being—the inherent rights of the individual animal—to an inordinate degree. The New Environmentalism is thus more about social, even religious, trends than it is about science. This invests it with a power that science alone will never have, because it is grounded in the heart more than in the mind.
Africa is the ultimate battleground for these dueling conservation concepts. It still has enough wildlife to make the stakes worthwhile. Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, the only other regions with large populations of megafauna, are generally not in this battle. Animal rights groups maintain a presence there, but wildlife management is rigorously codified under federal, state, and provincial law and based on data, not morality. Though good cases can be made that wildlife policies in Alaska and Canada are significantly influenced by political pressure, nothing is likely to shift the argument decisively in favor of animal rights advocates. True, the clubbing of harp seal pups has diminished as a result of international outrage. But all the major terrestrial species—including brown bears, wolves, caribou, musk oxen, Dall sheep, mountain goats, even polar bears—are still hunted. The support for consumptive wildlife management is broad and deep. Hunting in Alaska and the Canadian North is largely considered a birthright.
But Africa is in a state of flux, and new doctrines are not reflexively spurned. Big game hunting has never been a favored activity for most indigenous Africans, with the exception of tribes such as the Wata and the San. Moreover, since it carries the indelible stain of white colonialism, hunting will always be controversial, even in situations in which it is a proven and effective conservation tool. Ecotourism, on the other hand, is appealing for the opposite reason: it has no ties to an oppressive past. In many cases—as will be discussed later—ecotourism can exert deleterious impacts on land and wildlife. And the revenues of many ecotourism enterprises are monopolized by foreign owners and government officials, with few benefits trickling down to local villagers. But as a brand, ecotourism is ascendant. It is allied with the New Environmentalism, with animal rights, with all that is modern, young, and appealing. Hunting labors under an onus imposed by its own name, by a history that appears drear and cruel, by the whiteness and age of its primary practitioners. In the future, poaching will continue in the African game lands; the same can’t be said of legal hunting.
CHAPTER 5
My Cow Trumps Your Lion
The road north from Nanyuki into the rangelands of Laikipia starts out as macadam but quickly turns to dirt. After about twenty miles or so, a side road joins the main highway from the west—a track, really, gouged out of the rock and bush long ago by a small grader or perhaps a gang of men wielding shovels and picks. From the looks of it, the road seems used more by wildlife than motor vehicles; animal tracks are everywhere in the buff-colored dust on the shoulders. Taking even a four-wheel-drive rig down this route is a rough go. Deep gullies and big rocks allow a top speed of perhaps fifteen miles an hour, slower still on the innumerable curves and steep little pitches and grades. The topography here is like a sea abruptly fossilized during a squall: dips and bumps and declivities, hills, scarps, plateaus, abrupt drop-offs, all covered with the ubiquitous thorn-wood scrub that blankets the soil from the slopes of Mount Kenya north through the Horn of Africa.
The game is abundant—more than a layperson would expect for such an arid and spare landscape. Thomson’s and Grant’s gazelles bound away from the road at the approach of a car. Dik-diks seek the shade of every low-hanging shrub. Panicked wart hogs sprint through the bush, their tails erect as semaphores. Hartebeests and oryx graze singly or in small groups. Giraffes extend their necks above the thorn-wood canopy. As the road winds down a slope to a bridge crossing the sluggish Ewaso Nyiro River, waterbucks can be discerned drifting between the fever trees, and troops of baboons forage for grubs and grasses, monitored by alpha males squatting on their haunches. In the deep, stagnant pools, hippos abide. At night, spotted hyenas, bat-eared foxes, and leopards are often startled by the headlights of approaching vehicles. Everywhere are piles of soccer ball–sized turds—elephant dung.
After crossing the river, the track wends along a small flat, where brilliantly hued lilac-breasted rollers preen on acacia branches. The road then veers up a steep hill, skirts a ridge, and terminates abruptly at Sungelai, the home of Laurence Frank—a research associate of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California and one of East Africa’s foremost predator researchers.
The structure is literally built into a cliff: a sprawling assemblage of native stone and lumber, with great plate glass windows that overlook the Ewaso Nyiro gorge. It is easy to spend an entire day on the deck beyond the windows, glassing the river course and miles and miles of surrounding hills for game. Nor do you have to look far. Hyraxes have established themselves in the rocks below the house and often lounge on the deck’s railing, importuning handouts. Elephants drift in front of the home almost daily, their utter silence both eerie and intimidating as they pad across the rough, scrubby land. And a small herd of Cape buffalo forages in the immediate area; one old lone bull, with a gigantic boss and wicked, majestically curved horns, typically beds down about a hundred yards from Frank’s bedroom door. At twilight, several hundred white-winged bats stream into the sky from the rafters of the house for their nightly round of foraging, providing a dramatic spectacle for guests enjoying preprandial cocktails.
Sometimes the wildlife does more than display itself in picturesque fashion beyond the plate glass. A few years ago, Alayne Cotterill, a biologist who works with Frank on his predator projects, was sleeping in a bedroom with her two children and her dog. As she often did, Cotterill had left her sliding glass door open to access the cool night breeze that sweeps down the Ewaso Nyiro gorge. She was awakened in the early morning by the frenzied barking of her dog. Turning on the light, she found a large leopard contemplating the family tableau from the foot of the bed. After a moment, the cat turned and walked back out the bedroom door. Because African leopards seldom attack human beings without provocation, Cotterill feels the cat was drawn by her dog. In any event, she now sleeps with her bedroom doors closed.
This is Frank’s headquarters, though he is often away for days or weeks at a time, overseeing predator conservation projects across Kenya. It is his redoubt, the place he uses to work up data, recharge, perhaps even relax a little. Now past sixty, Frank is six feet tall and big-boned, and he still carries a lot of muscle. He has tangled, thinning hair, large eyes that stare fixedly from behind thick spectacles, blunt features, and a prognathous jaw that creates an impression of latent aggression. And indeed, he can be aggressive, a quality that doesn’t necessarily ill-serve him in Africa. Most of the people who know Frank highly respect him, and a few fear him, including some of his own research associates. Normally low-key, even diffident, he quickly gets his back up when encountering stupidity or ineptitude. On more than one occasion, he has not shied from physical confrontation. He characterizes himself as “a putz, a puppy dog, somebody who is all thumbs.” But anyone who has seen him at work—setting snares for lions, engrossed in laboratory procedures, tearing apart a Land Rover transmission, repairing a handgun—can only consider his self-evaluations false modesty. By any consideration, he would seem one of the most competent people on the planet.
In
