Where the Cattle Sleep With One Eye Open
Cattle farming in predator territory on Mount Kenya

Michael Dyer studied the ‘scoreboard’ on the ranch’s office wall. A cursory glance showed that his cattle were now losing their perennial battle with the Mount Kenya lions at the rate of three a month. The stockman seemed surprisingly cheerful about this.
            “Figures like these are what I like to see,” he said. “It shows that the lions are strong and plentiful. It’s a sacrifice I’m happy to make.”
            Times have certainly changed since Michael’s grandfather built one of the first ranches in Laikipia district, on the remote northern flank of Mount Kenya. It took him several weeks with a flock of sheep and an oxen cart to cover just a hundred miles. Soon after he arrived a storm wiped out two hundred of his ewes and it was not long before disease had decimated his flock at a rate that even the voracious predators could not keep pace with.
            Eighty years later his grandson runs a herd of three thousand of the hardy Boran cattle that have given Borana Ranch its name. The cattle, prized for their resistance to drought, pests and altitude, are going strong. But so too are the local lions.
It is not for nothing that Borana is known as ‘the place where the cattle sleep with one eye open.’
The herd is split into groups that are small enough to be watched by herdsmen with spears during the day but at night the cattle must be driven into sturdy timber bomas. At first glance these fortress-like compounds, hung with lanterns and guarded by riflemen, seem unnecessarily robust even for lion. But they must be built to withstand a stampede; the lions have learned that the best way to get access to this meat is to panic the herd and drive it out of the boma.
            “Leopards are harder to keep out since they are so agile,” explains Michael, “but as soon as the calves are weaned we remove that temptation to another ranch that doesn’t have a predator problem.”
            In 1990 Michael and his wife Nicky came up with a strategy that they hoped would transform their own ‘predator problem’ into an enviable asset. Two years later the luxurious six-room Borana Lodge was opened.
“We hoped that the lodge would cover the cost of the carnivores and offset some of the drop in world beef prices,” explains Michael. The initiative was a great success and the Dyer’s subsequently set up the Laikipia Wildlife Forum which now coordinates conservation initiatives across almost a hundred commercial ranches and local communities and markets a region that currently attracts 60,000 tourists a year.
All over Kenya snaring (for bush-meat), poisoning (to eradicate predators) and overcrowding are taking their toll on wildlife even in the biggest national parks. Maasai spears have already reduced to a handful the lions of Nairobi National Park and, during the last few years, increasingly blood-thirsty morani hunting parties have been massacring big cats all over Kenya and Tanzania. In the Chyulu Hills (between Amboseli and Tsavo national parks) poison, spears and snares have all but exterminated predator populations and there have been killings even in the Maasai Mara’s celebrated ‘big cat country.’ Laikipia is the only place in the country where animal numbers are actually increasing and it now records population densities second only to the Mara.
Visitors at Borana often see as many as 23 different animals in a single game-drive and are able to gallop through savannah that is still packed with herds of elephant, giraffe, zebra, buffalo, hartebeest, eland, oryx and gazelle. Past guests have included Princess Anne, Ronnie Wood, Madonna and the production team from The Lion King. (The original ‘Pride Rock’ is actually Frog Rock, just across the valley from the lodge).
The local pastoralist communities of Laikipia have traditionally considered hunting below their dignity and the white settlers who came later made sure that enough land was left aside for wildlife. The lions have learned to confine their hunting to the relative safety of the commercial ranchlands and will do their best to keep out of reach of the Maasai spears.
There are exceptions however. Fifty-seven year old Mzee Malawi has reason to remember 10 June 2001 very clearly. “I was sleeping in my hut when children came running in. A lion had just killed seven of my goats,” he told me. “When I got to the grazing land a big male was eating one of the goats. I threw my spear into his shoulder and he attacked me. My right arm was all the way up to the elbow in his throat when I pulled out my panga and cut him on the back. He ran off and I thought I was safe. Then he changed his mind and came back for me. When he bit my arm again I killed him with the knife.”
One of the ranchers helicoptered Malawi to a hospital where they were able to save his arm but the old man was lucky to be alive.
“Oooh, it was a big problem,” he said. “A big war!”
Lions do not tend to last long in Maasai country and for the Laikipia communities spotted hyenas are the most common problem. Little is known about the populations of hyenas but Dr Laurence G Frank, who spent twenty years studying them in the Mara, says that they too are being poisoned into extinction across the country. In 1997 Dr Frank (University of California, Berkeley) set up the Laikipia Predator Project ‘to foster coexistence between predators and livestock outside national parks.’
“Large predators are wide-ranging animals,” he explains. “The home ranges of most extend across park boundaries, exposing them to the temptations of livestock, with the inevitable consequences.”
If something is not done Dr Frank can foresee a time when we will be left with just a few genetically weakened populations in the biggest of the national parks. Such groups are notoriously susceptible to disease; in the early ‘90s canine distemper killed one-third of the lions in the Serengeti and in the last decade it has wiped out entire populations of African Wild Dogs.
Wild dogs range across particularly huge areas and there are few parks that are large enough to accommodate them; even if a pack’s territory is centred in a reserve it is believed that most adults are killed by humans. These tireless hunters had been extinct in Laikipia for almost twenty years when Rosie Woodroffe, Dr Frank’s Berkeley colleague, saw three wild dogs near Ewaso Ng’iro River early one morning in 1999. Six years later Laikipia is the only place in the world that has a steadily growing population of wild dogs. Old-time Laikipia ranchers still recall times when the dogs were shot on sight for their massacres of sheep but Dr Woodroffe’s studies at Laikipia have shown that in areas where there is plenty of wild prey the dogs will actually go out of their way to avoid livestock. Here, once again, it is the powerful lions that are the greatest danger for the wild dogs.
Laikipia produces more lions than the ecosystem can absorb and up to one in five lions must be shot every year as habitual livestock killers. Even at this rate numbers are growing annually.
It costs a rancher an estimated US$350 annually to tolerate a single lion on his land. This is an expense that local pastoralists are unwilling to bear - an AK-47 is inexpensive by comparison. Poisons are cheaper still.
In February last year an entire pride of seven lions was poisoned (using strychnine that is distributed by the Veterinary Department to control domestic dogs numbers). The Laikipia Predator Project brought the case before the police but the culprit was too influential to be arrested. In the same month ‘the man-eater of Laikipia’ (the first in living memory) made a severe tactical error by eating the brother of an important politician. Rangers from Kenya Wildlife Service finally killed the big male after an expensive 6-week hunt.
            Commercial hunting was banned in Kenya in 1977 but many Laikipia ranchers and conservationists argue that hunting safaris could undertake the unfortunate but necessary task of exterminating ‘problem animals’…and pay US$30,000 a time for the ‘privilege.’ This money could then be recycled into conservation and to local pastoralists who would soon realise that random poisoning was a waste of valuable resources.
With proper management and care Laikipia has the potential to become the breeding grounds that could restock the depleted wildlife resources of East Africa. The great hope of the Laikipia Predator Project is that the increased wave of Maasai spearings can be stemmed and the tolerance of pastoralists in the vast northern areas of Kenya can be increased so that predators can find room to establish new territories.
“Laikipia may be the only part of the world where ranchers enthusiastically tolerate a healthy population of large carnivores,” says Dr Frank. The philosophies and techniques developed in this wild and beautiful part of Africa might finally provide the key to the survival and dispersal of animals as diverse as tigers, wolves, dingoes and jaguars.

Laikipia Factfile

Find out more:
Borana Lodge (www.borana.co.ke) has six separate cottages (US$430 pp full board), each with their own unobstructed views of a waterhole that is regularly visited by wildlife. Game-drives, walking safaris and mountain-biking are offered but Borana is particularly renowned as one of Africa’s best horse-riding venues. The well-schooled, bush-smart thoroughbred-Somali crosses offer a great chance for dawn gallops with zebra and giraffe or for arranging long-distance, overnight ‘pioneer column skirmishes’ among the great rhino herds of Lewa Downs.
            Air Kenya flies daily from Nairobi to Laikipia or private charter can be arranged to Borana’s own airstrip…where the resident zebra herd will probably be waiting to meet you!
 

The End