Naivasha, Kenya – For the farmers of Kenya, life is a constant contest for grass and water between their herds and the wild animals that share the land.
Now they are waging a new struggle, this time against the international animal welfare lobby. Pleading poverty, the farmers want to open their land to wealthy fee-paying hunters. Advocacy groups are firmly opposed.
The standoff has made Kenya the latest and perhaps most dramatic arena for the debate over hunting and its role in financing conservation.
A million tourists a year spend more than $580 million to see and photograph lions, elephants, gazelle and other wildlife on this East African country’s savannas, but the revenue isn’t enough to protect the animals.
Only 8 percent of land in Kenya, a country twice the size of Nevada, is set aside for wildlife. The rest is privately or communally owned, and most of Kenya’s wild animals live there. By some estimates, wildlife numbers have dropped 60 percent since the mid-1970s and continue to plummet because of human encroachment and illegal hunting for food.
Landowners say they can only go on maintaining animal sanctuaries if they can sell hunting rights. No one is suggesting killing endangered species or hunting in existing protected areas. Only common animals on private land would be hunted, in a controlled way, advocates say.
“The losses we are getting from livestock predation, or even medical bills for people who have been injured by elephants, buffaloes and even lions, is quite high,” said Yusuf Ole Petenya of the Shompole Community Trust, a tribal foundation in animal-rich southern Kenya.
The trust opened a luxury wildlife lodge to help lift Petenya’s Maasai clan out of poverty, but it’s not working, he said, because the cost of conservation outstrips the profits from tourism.
Kenya has poor health care, low education levels and a government that barely functions outside the capital, Nairobi. There is no money to buy land or pay people to protect wildlife. Kenya banned sport hunting in 1977, but allowed limited hunting to cull animals and harvest game meat until 2003, when animal groups shut it down.
Now, the Kenyan government has reopened the debate over hunting by setting up an advisory group to thrash out the pros and cons.
James Isiche of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said his organization seeks a blanket ban on what it calls “consumptive use of wildlife.”
“If you look at wildlife from the point of view that wildlife can bring in money, you begin to get into trouble,” he said.
Isiche, who sits on the government advisory committee on hunting, says the answer is for donors to buy more land for conservation, strictly limit development in rural areas, and compensate people for losses caused by wildlife. However, he acknowledges funding is scarce.
Opposing him is Andrew Enniskillen, also Kenyan and a leader among private landowners. He has combined land rehabilitation, wildlife conservation and commercial cattle breeding on his ranch on Lake Naivasha. He says the wildlife corridor he provides to a national park is losing him money and the resulting boom in the zebra population is destroying his ranch.
He argues that revenue from hunting would provide more funds for conservation and help fight the poaching problem. When hunting was allowed, he says, he could control the zebra population by hiring a hunter to kill up to 100 a year and sell the skins and meat.
