his conversation somehow seems meticulously punctuated, down to semicolons, hyphens, and parentheses. Though he is not Scottish, he deeply enjoys the bagpipes and the smokiest, most phenolic of single malt scotches. His manners are almost courtly, though he also is capable of blithely interjecting rude, shocking, or scabrous comments into genteel conversations. He is a lifelong insomniac, a great fan of British spy fiction, an avid duck hunter with indifferent shooting skills, a man who is capable of bivouacking in the bush over his snares for days at a time, augmenting his meager diet with meat salvaged from his “bait”—carcasses of zebras, elands, or camels that have been dispatched by lions or hyenas.
Many things disturb Laurence Frank. He is upset when forced to spend long periods of time away from his five daughters because of his work; the red tape involved in transporting animal specimens from Kenya to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley; his intense chronic lower back pain induced from four decades of pounding around East Africa in Land Rovers; the Byzantine politics of Kenya; the opinions of both opponents and friends; and the general vagaries of fate. But perhaps nothing upsets him more than the decline of his beloved predators.
Frank made his academic bones through seminal research on spotted hyenas, focusing largely on social organization and the role masculinizing hormones play in female development and group dynamics.
He is a cofounder of a captive spotted hyena project at the University of California, Berkeley, initiated to investigate their endocrinology and behavior at close range. The project is ongoing, with the animals housed in spacious compounds at a site in the Berkeley hills; on still nights, their hoots and gibbering resound down the slopes and vales. Spotted hyenas, Frank avers, are among the most intelligent and socially sophisticated of animals. Some of the animals that reside at the Berkeley compound he has raised from cubs. It is an alarming experience to see him casually clamber into a compound with a large dominant female hyena and playfully wrestle her, knowing her jaws could snap his femur with a casual twitch of her masseter muscles. He bars visitors from sharing his fun. “She knows me,” he said when I asked one time if I could join him with one of the animals. “She grew up with me. Her reaction to you would be—unpredictable.” Frank’s eyes glow when he’s with his animals. A man who inveighs against anthropomorphism, he nevertheless loves—deeply loves—hyenas.
Over the course of the past three decades, Frank’s professional emphasis has shifted from ethology to conservation biology, a change he credits as a logical response to empirical observation. “When the world around you is dying, you can’t simply accept it,” he says, referring to Kenya’s wildlife crash. “You have to act, whether or not it makes a difference.”
Frank has established several predator projects in Kenya, all roughly based on the same template: monitoring the number of lions and hyenas through tracking, telemetry, and local contacts; minimizing depredation of livestock through the promotion of boma (thorn-wood corral) construction and other intensive husbandry methods; and hiring local moran (young warriors) to serve as trackers, community liaisons, and educators. Frank would characterize his success as moderate at best, but others are more generous, particularly in Laikipia, where his work with ranchers on private holdings and with Maasai elders on communal tribal homelands has resulted in a generally stable population of lions and spotted hyenas. On Mugie, a forty-nine-thousand-acre ranch that combines cattle and sheep production with ecotourism on the northern Laikipia Plateau, lions have become a profit center; not coincidentally, Mugie’s ranchers are active participants in Frank’s program. Mugie supports about ten to fifteen lions along with its rich assortment of other wildlife species, and the interaction of the big cats with their prey is a major attraction for visitors. It’s easy to see why: observing lions is a much more intimate experience at Mugie than it is on the Serengeti or Maasai Mara, where you have to jockey with ten to twenty minivans to catch a glimpse of a pride. During one trip to Kenya, I passed a couple of days with Frank on Mugie, and much of the time was spent with the lions. On one occasion we observed them, at close quarters, gorging on a zebra kill; on another, we darted a young male and fitted him with a telemetry collar. Besides Frank and me, there were just a couple of his associate researchers, the ranch manager Claus Mortensen, and the wildlife. The experience is an indelible and treasured memory.
FIGURE 3. Laurence Frank takes tissue samples from an anesthetized lion at Mugie Ranch, Laikipia. Note the firearms: attacks are always a possibility during fieldwork with lions. (Glen Martin)
Still, frustration is part of Frank’s job description. A few ranchers continue to evaluate lions, hyenas, and leopards according to the old Game Department definition of “vermin” and eliminate them remorselessly. And in southern Kenya among the Maasai, the fierce opposition to predator conservation has been daunting. But even while trying to change hearts and minds in Maasailand, Frank says he understands their position.“The Maasai are a deeply conservative people,” he says.“Their resistance to change has allowed them to maintain cultural cohesion. And the focal point, the node of Maasai culture, is cattle. They believe God has delivered all the world’s cattle to their care. They love them, sing to them. Cattle aren’t just a store of wealth, a symbol of wealth—they are wealth, the best of all possible currencies. The Kenyan shilling is considered a poor if sometimes acceptable substitute for a cow.”
To the Maasai, a lion that kills a cow or goat thus strikes at the very heart of social order and must be eliminated. Moreover, observes Frank, lions remain a means for moran to demonstrate their courage and prowess; though technically proscribed by the governments of both Kenya and Tanzania (where most Maasai live), communal lion hunts conducted by moran equipped only with shields and spears remain commonplace. The tail is kept as a trophy and is considered a great status symbol. “In the past, it wasn’t much of an issue, because there were plenty of lions and relatively few Maasai,” Frank observes. “But the Maasai population has exploded. Currently, you have too many guys poking too few lions with spears. Lions are disappearing wholesale from Maasai territory.”
Exacerbating the situation is the use of the insecticide Furadan as a predator poison throughout East Africa. For years, Frank observes, Furadan has been available at every trading post and small store in rural Kenya and Tanzania, where it sells for less than a dollar a packet. “Everyone knew it isn’t being used for insects,” he says. “It’s an extremely effective predicide. Put it on a kill, and it wipes out lions, hyenas, and leopards very efficiently. Also vultures, jackals—anything else that comes into the carcass.” Furadan availability has only lately been reduced, thanks mainly to CBS’s 60 Minutes, which featured a segment on Frank.
Despite the efforts of Frank and other conservation biologists, lions are in free fall across East Africa, particularly—and ironically, given the Born Free saga—in Kenya (Laikipia being the notable exception). By best estimates, continental populations have plummeted from roughly two hundred thousand two decades ago to perhaps thirty thousand today. Retaliatory killings by pastoralists are the primary cause; a subsidiary but growing threat is the Chinese traditional medicine market. “Tiger bone is a favored remedy, but with tigers disappearing, the Chinese are turning increasingly to lion bone,” Frank observes.
But the underlying reason for the lion decline, says Frank, is even more basic: lions have no value in modern Kenya. Mugie and a few other private ranches that maintain tourist lodges, the national parks, the Maasai Mara National Reserve—these are exceptions to the general rule, places where lions are hanging on because they have a constituency: wealthy tourists and the businesses that cater to them. But across the rest of the country, across most of Africa, lions are liabilities, potential threats to property and human life.
“It’s all very well to admire lions from the safety of a minivan,” observes Ian Parker. “But if you’re a pastoralist living in a little manyatta [semipermanent camp] deep in the bush with nothing to your name but a few cows, it’s another matter altogether. You’re not
