By Stephanie Dloniak, The New York Times, September 10, 2012
NAIROBI, Kenya —
The lioness lay sleeping in the bed of a dark green pickup, her eyes covered
with a soft blue cloth, as a veterinarian in camouflage stood over her. “Ni
kubwa!” he said in Swahili: “She’s big!”
She was in fact
surprisingly fat, fluffy and young. Surprisingly because she had been living in
the suburbs of Nairobi for at least four months, and it was hard to believe she
was so fit and healthy.
And hard to believe that she was actually captured. Tranquilizing a
wild large carnivore is always stressful, and these were hardly the best
circumstances. Cornered by one of my dogs at 6:30 that morning, she was
protecting a trio of 2-month-old cubs in thick bushes at the bottom of my
property.
It took 12 rangers and 3 vets from the Kenya Wildlife Service — aided
by two Land Cruisers, a pickup and a tractor — more than six hours to dart her
and capture the cubs by hand. The small, swarming crowd of onlookers, many
taking pictures on their phones, did not make things easier.
As difficult and exciting as capturing the lions was, a more imposing
question now loomed: What do you do with them?
The vision of lion prides roaming endless African savannas, unaffected
by people, is a romanticized image that survives in just a few very large
protected areas. Lions play important roles in ecosystems and bring in millions
of dollars from safari tourism, but they are hard to live with and potentially
very dangerous.
The African lion is listed as a threatened species by the International Union for
the Conservation of Nature. Only 20,000 to 40,000 wild lions remain,
in just 20 percent of the historical range of the species.
As the human population continues to grow rapidly here, rates of
conflict with lions and other wildlife are growing too. These conflicts are a
great threat to carnivores in Africa, and how they are managed will determine
the fate of the lion in Kenya.
Unfortunately, we know very little about suburban wildlife in Africa.
Large carnivores that make their way into urban or suburban areas are often
quickly killed by vehicles or people — leaving no time to study them. Or as the
biologist Craig Packer at the University of Minnesota bluntly puts it,
“Usually, urban carnivores are encountered as road kills.”
Dr. Packer, the director of the Serengeti
Lion Project, a long-running study of lions in Tanzania, agrees with
other experts that the best solution for lions like the ones captured in my
yard may be euthanasia — despite the lion’s threatened status. The reasons are
rooted in geography and fundamental aspects of lion biology.
My neighborhood, Mukoma Estate, is a partly forested, developing
suburb on the south side of Nairobi. It is immediately west of Nairobi National
Park, about 45 square miles of partly fenced grassland and forest less than
five miles from the central business district of a city of more than three
million people. Long-term residents recall lions moving through Mukoma in the
past; baboons, warthogs and a leopard still call Mukoma home.
Successful urban carnivores include coyotes, foxes, raccoons and
badgers — smaller animals with generalist diets that allow them to eat just
about anything. But lions, weighing 240 to 600 pounds and eating only meat,
certainly do not meet these criteria; the Mukoma lions were a direct threat to
people, and they killed numerous warthogs, several dogs and goats, and two
young giraffes.
But it is unlikely that they were lured here by the availability of
such prey. From limited monitoring by the group Friends of
Nairobi National Park, Dr. Packer says that lionesses are probably
living and having cubs outside the park because there is a large lion
population inside it — including a number of adult males that pose a risk of
infanticide.
“If lions are indeed at high density within the park,” said Laurence
G. Frank of the Museum
of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, and
the Kenyan research group Living With Lions, “as long as she can get
through the fence, she is likely to move the cubs back out. This situation is
likely to arise again in the near future, creating an ongoing management
problem and continuing threat of someone being killed or injured.” So returning
the lioness and her cubs to the park was not a solution.
Human-lion conflict occurs often in more rural settings, and people
are advised to not kill carnivores or they will face prosecution. Thus, under
pressure to “not kill any lions themselves,” Patrick Omondi, head of species
conservation at the Kenya Wildlife Service, told me that the captured lions
were taken to Meru National Park, about 200 miles northeast of Nairobi.
Carnivore biologists collectively cringed. Again, Dr. Packer put it
bluntly: “Sending them to Meru is a death sentence.”
The technique, translocation, is an important tool for the management
of carnivores in networks of intensively managed, fenced reserves, as in South
Africa. But such a network does not exist in Kenya, and moving lions that are known
livestock killers only shifts the problem to another area.
In addition, lions are highly territorial, and do not welcome
newcomers. “The great majority of people are not aware of the true consequences
of translocating carnivores, and just assume that it is the ‘kind’ thing to
do,” Dr. Frank said. “Translocating a lion kills it slowly and cruelly, but out
of sight.
“Even if they are released in the center of Meru, the existing lion
population will force her to the boundaries, where she will encounter livestock
and people at a time when she is desperate to feed her cubs.”
Both Dr. Packer and Dr. Frank say the most humane solution for the
suburban lions would have been euthanasia. But there is “a complete
disconnect,” Dr. Packer told me, “between the public’s attachment to individual
animals and the profound need to conserve populations, and a diversion of
resources from what is critical.” Ultimately, lions may persist in Nairobi
National Park only if it can be fenced completely.
While
capturing and translocating suburban lions sounds like reality television
fodder, the realities of modern wildlife management are not so entertaining.
That romantic vision of lions will never be realized again, especially on the
developing outskirts of Nairobi. So while appearing heartless on the surface,
the utilitarian act of euthanizing some problem animals for the greater good of
the species may prove critical to having any wild lions at all in Kenya.
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