also worried they’ll kill you or your family members outright.”
Frank thus measures his success to the degree that he has been able to reinvest lions with value. On Mugie and other Laikipia ranches that support his work, the lions are part of the tourist draw. And in Amboseli National Park and surrounding lands, the Lion Guardians project, which employs Maasai moran to track and protect lions, is yielding positive results, not because the Maasai have abruptly changed their general view of lions, but because they derive considerable benefit from the program. Initiated by two of Frank’s associates, Leela Hazzah and Stephanie Dolrenry, the Lion Guardians program has proved so successful at Amboseli that the researchers plan to extend it to the Maasai Mara.
Lion Guardian participants receive a salary and are given cell phones—tremendous incentives in Maasailand. Jobs that pay hard currency are exceedingly difficult to come by in the region, and though the Maasai generally are disdainful of modern technology, they have taken to cell phones enthusiastically; the devices allow tribal members to stay in close touch with far-flung relatives and, even more critically, allow them to track cattle prices in local markets. Before the advent of cellular coverage in Maasailand—placing an international call from a mobile phone is now as easy in the middle of the Serengeti as in Manhattan—tribal members had to take whatever price was offered when they brought their stock to market. Typically, they were low-balled. Now they can monitor prices at various markets throughout Kenya and Tanzania, delivering their animals only when given a quote that suits them.
But the Lion Guardian program also provides Maasai moran with something they value far more than money or advanced technology: prestige. Though the Maasai will typically exterminate any predators they encounter, lions are inextricably intertwined with their lives, culture, and mythos. Lions are the supreme test of a moran and hence help define what it means to be Maasai. “When a Maasai man attains elder status, usually in his early forties, he is expected to spend his days advising, drinking beer, and telling tales of past deeds,” says Rian Labuschagne. “It is considered the appropriate progression for a man who has spent a dangerous youth and early adulthood caring for livestock and defending the tribe.” And the stories that confer the highest status to the teller, says Labuschagne, are those that concern successful cattle raids against enemies—and lion hunts.
The Lion Guardian program accommodates this almost reflexive need of young Maasai males to interact with lions, says Frank: “It keeps them associated with lions, which ultimately gains them great respect from other tribal members. They’re out in the field, tracking lions, informing locals when lions are in the area, helping herders build bomas to protect their stock. The fact that we offer paying jobs is a tremendous incentive, but the opportunity to interact with lions on an ongoing basis, allowing the moran to gain the admiration of their relatives and friends, is also a real attraction.” The moran of the Lion Guardian corps are thus able to collect their own heroic tales of lion encounters, to be told when they are elders—but tales with a crucial difference from those of earlier Maasai culture. In these stories, the lions have been transformed from the killer, the despoiler, the implacable enemy of the people, to something of inherent value.
That, at least, is the hope; no one is less certain of positive results from any conservation initiative than Frank, who has spent more than forty years adjusting the ideals of his youth to the hard realities of Africa. But if he is not certain of success, he is most certainly convinced of failure if innovative programs are not instituted to preserve predators; and the Lion Guardians, he emphasizes, is just such a program. It works. “It has been successful beyond anyone’s wildest hopes,” he says. “It has totally halted lion killings in the areas where it’s implemented. The aftermath of the [2009–10] drought shows this. In a four-month period, eighteen lions were killed in one small area [five hundred square kilometers] that had no Guardians—and none were killed in a thirty-five-hundred-square-kilometer area patrolled by Guardians. That’s a stunning achievement.”
Frank also maintains that successful lion conservation programs paradoxically must involve the elimination of selected animals, specifically chronic livestock killers. If a particular lion develops a taste for beef or mutton—something that often occurs when injury or age renders an animal unfit to take wild game—then it must be killed, Frank says. There can be no alternative: once a lion keys into livestock as primary prey, rehabilitation is almost impossible—and, in the larger scheme of species conservation, hardly worth the time and money required for even a successful attempt. Too, Frank’s initiatives depend on the goodwill of the people who live in lion country.
“Candidly, cattle killers are usually created by bad livestock practices,” he observes. “When people construct good bomas and really watch their animals, there’s usually no problem—the lions never learn to kill stock. But when a lion does go bad, we’ll work with the affected rancher or pastoralist and the Kenya Wildlife Service to eliminate it. It’s very rare that it comes to that, but we have to be willing to help out when it does. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have any credibility. We’re good at tracking and snaring, and we’ve put telemetry collars on a lot of predators, so sometimes we can locate the problem animal right away.”
Frank, in fact, has become a kind of de facto troubleshooter for ranchers and pastoralists with predator problems. On one occasion, I accompanied him to a Laikipia ranch that reportedly supported a rabid spotted hyena. Rabies is endemic among East Africa’s predators and sometimes poses as much of a threat to local hyena populations as poisoning does; Frank is anxious to do what he can to control the disease at any opportunity. On arriving at the ranch, Frank conferred with the owner, who directed him to a brushy river course. It didn’t take long to find the hyena—a relatively young male; we approached it easily as it staggered along the riverbank, shivering and whining, before disappearing into thick brush. Frank loaded his short-barreled 12-gauge pump shotgun with rifled slugs and set off in pursuit; I was timorous at the prospect of encountering a rabid hyena in heavy vegetation, so elected to stay behind. In short order there was a single shot. I investigated, to find Frank standing over the dead hyena, which he had dispatched with a slug placed behind the shoulder. He seemed deeply saddened. “I hate killing these guys,” he said as he prepared to drag the carcass to his Land Rover and ultimately to his lab for the usual battery of samples and tests. “It makes me feel incredibly bad when I have to do it. They are such wonderful animals.” He sighed deeply. “Sometimes there’s simply no alternative.”
On another occasion, Frank was called to a ranch to pick up a leopard. The couple who owned the property—amiable quasi New Agers who combined modest cattle production with some low-key ecotourism—had captured the animal in a box trap after it had eaten their favorite dog. They didn’t want to kill the cat; they simply wanted it gone. Frank and I arrived, and we bent down and looked into the box trap. The leopard, which had been crouched in the gloom at the far end of the trap, made an enormous leap and slammed against the gate, claws extended, teeth bared, spittle flying, eyes lambent with green fire. The entire trap shook with the impact, and a snarl that sounded like an overrevving F-15 split the air. The charge was so abrupt and frightening that I felt any number of internal organs loosening, but Frank merely evinced mild interest. “Aw, poor guy,” he said. “Look—he broke off a canine. They get into these box traps, and they tear themselves up trying to get out. Box traps are really a terrible way of dealing with predators; our snares are much more effective and humane. The animals can’t damage themselves, and you can anesthetize them and release them easily.”
FIGURE 4. Laikipia Predator Project researchers take measurements and tissue samples from an anesthetized leopard that had been killing dogs. It was captured in a box trap by local ranchers. (Glen Martin)
After considerable effort, Frank managed to inject the animal with an anesthetic. Once the leopard conked out, Frank took tissue samples and buckled a telemetry collar around its neck, then loaded the limp, drooling, and utterly unconscious
