Kenya

Bachelor giraffes getting ready to neck. Photo by David Lansing.

The reticulated giraffes around Sarara are mezmerizing. There patterns are so much more distinct than the Masai giraffes in the south whose hides look like they’ve been washed in hot water making the dark brown bleed onto the white. The coats of reticulated giraffes, however, look crisp and freshly pressed.

This morning we stopped not far from camp and watched a handful of twigas, including a couple of young ones, move like shadows among the thorn trees. As we came up, they stopped, ears out, their large heavily lashed eyes looking inquisitively at us. The young ones, uncertain as to our intent, lollopped back to Mum in that delicious slow-motion amble they have.

They blend in so well with their surroundings that it was a few minutes before we realized that not far from this little mama-toto group were a few young bachelors, doing a little neck-knocking, as Calvin calls it, the mostly-gentle sparring matches where they slap their necks against each other to determine who gets to hook up with the women when the time comes.

Hardy, who always seems to be thinking about food when we’re out game-watching, asked Calvin how they tasted. “They’re delicious,” Calvin said with great enthusiasm, and there then ensued a long conversation about which other animals were or weren’t worth eating. Forget about bush pig or wart-hog, Calvin said. They’ve got all kinds of parasites. Same with zebra.

“Really?” Hardy said. “I’ve always heard that zebra are pretty tasty.”

Can be, Calvin said, but the problem is that even though zebra can have fat bellies and look quite healthy, they might actually be starving to death and full of parasites. Even giraffes have their health problems out in the wild and are susceptible to various epidemics, like rinderpest, a viral disease also called cattle plague. Evidently in the 1960s, an epidemic wiped out half of the giraffe population of Kenya.

On a cheerier note, Calvin told us that giraffes like to get a little drunk every once in awhile. They’ll eat the berries from marula trees which will then ferment in their stomachs and get intoxicated. Not a good thing to be drunk in the bush. Check out this short video which shows the effects of animals eating marula berries—it’s hilarious.

Our picnic setting next to a sand river. Photos by David Lansing.

When I started talking about Virginia and Robert Ruark’s 1951 safari yesterday (Could they really have downed 46 bottles of gin in six weeks? Surely he was talking about those mini-bottles from the airlines), I had no intention of chronicling their excesses.

In fact, the reason I even took up the Ruark book in the afternoon was because we’d had the most wonderful picnic yesterday afternoon in a shady glade next to a sand river and it got me to thinking about a passage in Ruark’s Horn of the Hunter that described a similar afternoon:

“We pulled out of Iringa, headed for a village by the Ruaha, and a few miles out of town we stopped for the lunch ceremony.

“’I love these picnics,’ Virginia said, nibbling happily at her nutritious delicious. “I always loved picnics as a kid. We used to go down into Rock Creek Park and have them on Saturdays when I was a little girl in Washington. There were always a lot of sex fiends loose in Rock Creek Park, and Mother was always afraid I would get raped or something, but I used to slip off and have picnics anyhow. Never thought I’d have a picnic three times a day, every day, though. Let’s take some pictures, this is such a lovely spot.’”

I was thinking of that, how Virginia loved to have picnics while on safari, and how I also really loved it when Calvin would just stop the safari vehicles somewhere—on a hill in the Mara or, like today, in a shady spot by a sand river–and we’d pull out the folding chairs and Julius would get into the chop block and turn out some sandwiches or maybe a cold pasta salad and we’d pull some very cold Tusker’s out of the cooler and sit in the shade and, like Virginia, think just how lucky we were to be having a picnic in such a beautiful spot.

One of the Samburu guides from Sarara had come with us for the day and as soon as we parked and started to set up the chairs, he quietly walked away from us and across the lugga, never saying anything to anyone. I didn’t think anything of it until we were just about finished and started packing up and the Samburu had yet to return.

I mentioned this to Calvin and he frowned and said the lmurran might never come back. “I suspect he’s walked back to that last village we passed to secretly visit his girlfriend and cause a little trouble.”

The Samburu warrior returned to us with a smile on his face and a song on his lips. Photo by David Lansing.

It seems that the lmurran had fallen in love with a young woman from the village who returned his affections, but the father of the young woman, as is his right, had promised her to one of the elders who already had two or three wives. Of course, this elder could provide a much more handsome dowry to the father than some young lmurran who still had only a few cattle.

“That’s the way it is here,” Calvin said. “Love has nothing to do with it. A marriage is just business.”

The wedding had gone on as planned. The young lmurran had to dance and celebrate with the other young warriors while his beloved was given to an old man who already had a couple of wives. But that didn’t mean the young warrior stopped loving the girl. Whenever he had an opportunity—like yesterday afternoon—he’d sneak back into the village and make love to the girl. Of course, if he was ever caught, it would be the end of him. And the woman.

And that’s what Calvin was worried about.

We packed the last of the chairs and the cooler. While everyone else climbed into the Land Cruisers, I took my time photographing some starlings, a milky white flower, the sand river—anything to give the Samburu an opportunity to appear out of the bush. Which he did just as I had given up on him.

“Here he comes!” I yelled at Calvin. He got out of the Toyota and came over to where I stood and the two of us watched the star-crossed lover purposefully stride back across the golden sand river, his shadow keeping one step ahead of him.

“Did you have to use your rungu?” Calvin asked him in Swahili.

“And why would I use my rungu?” the warrior replied. “There is nothing to be afraid of.”

He nimbly climbed up the back of the Cruiser and sat, legs splayed, on the roof. All the way back to Sarara, he sang some Samburu song in a happy, high voice. Obviously he was feeling quite pleased with himself. And with the time spent with his lover.

Robert Ruark, far left, and his wife, Virginia, far right, with Armand and Poochy Denis, explorer-filmmakers, in 1951.

Have you ever read Robert Ruark? God, you should. Another one of those people who, like Osa and Martin Johnson, was quite famous in his time and is now largely forgotten. He was a journalist and a columnist and magazine writer as well as an author. Around 1950, he was as well known (and almost as controversial) as someone like Rush Limbaugh is now. (The good news; if history has forgotten about Robert Ruark, who wrote 19 books and over 1,000 magazine articles in a career that lasted about 20 years, surely no one will have any idea who Rush Limbaugh is ten years after he dies).

Anyway, in 1951 Ruark spent $10,000 of his own money (even he admitted he must be crazy) to go on a two-month safari with his wife, Virginia, led by Harry Selby, then a young, unknown professional hunter for the safari company Ker & Downey. That safari, chronicled in the book he wrote about it, Horn of the Hunter, turned out to be a life-altering event for him, Virginia, and for Harry Selby. They all became famous.

That was fine for Harry Selby (after the book came out, clients had to book him five years in advance) but not so great for Robert and Virginia. Robert Ruark, who always like his gin, became a raging alcoholic (as did Osa Johnson following the success of her book, I Married Adventure; I guess being a successful writer doesn’t necessarily make you happy. Too bad about that) and a few years later, he and Virginia divorced.

Ruark suffered liver failure and died in a London hospital in 1965. He was only 49 years old. Virginia, who had her own drinking problems, died six months later (a biography of the Ruarks says that while Robert was “a cheerful drinker of unbelievable capacity, Virginia tended to become drunk quickly. Even when not drinking, she had periods in which she wandered vaguely, as if her mind was elsewhere. Ruark referred to these periods as her “fits,” compared them to his own “cutouts,” and bluntly ascribed them to alcohol. Virginia looked for other explanations, but it was obvious alcohol was at the root of her psychological problems, even if you concede his infidelity was the cause of her drinking.”)

Anyway, this afternoon I was sitting around camp, lazing on one of the large sofas in the mess tent while everyone else took a nap, rereading Ruark’s Horn of Hunter. It was warm and still and dusty out and I thought I might sneak in a G&T while everyone else was dozing, so I called over Jarso who was trying to make himself look busy by slowly wiping a wet cloth over the same stretch of bar he’d cleaned five minutes ago and five minutes before that.

I asked him if I might be able to get a gin and tonic and then went back to my reading:

“We drank quite a lot, for outdoor types,” Ruark writes. “We’d roll back to camp about 1 P.M. after a hard morning’s hunt, starved, thirsty, and dust-covered. The ginny bottle would be hanging, coolly beaded with sweat from the evaporation of the water bag. I was bartender, it always seemed.

“’What’ll it be? Dr. Ruark’s nutritious, delicious, character-molding martini, or one of those gin-and-nonsense things that children drink?” Gin-and-nonsense was Gordon’s elixir of life mixed with Rose’s lime juice or tonic. Harry and Virginia usually drank gin-and-nonsense. I am a martini man myself. Over six weeks we used up forty-six bottles of gin and a little less than half a bottle of vermouth. I like martinis dry.

“We drank, sitting in the comfortable camp chairs, with the mess tent cool and breezy and the river trees green and soothing for us to look at, and the fact that the martinis were warm in their plastic cups and that the bees dive-bombed the attractive nonsense drinks did not detract from the flavor or the effect. We drank a lot. Three apiece before lunch killed the whole bottle. But we never got tight. We never felt bad.”

Wait…did he say that three people drank off 46 bottles of gin in six weeks? “But we never got tight. We never felt bad.” Holy shit.

Right about then, Jarso came back carrying my gin and tonic on a wooden tray. He started to set it down. It looked delicious and I was sure I could smell the juniper berries and lime even before my hand touched the beading glass.

“I’m sorry to bother you again, Jarso,” I said, “but I think I’ve changed my mind about that drink. Would it be possible to get a cup of tea instead?”

“Tea, sir?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want the gin?”

“Well, yes, I do. Awfully much. Which is why I think I won’t.”

Jarso picked up the glass and put it back on the tray without saying a word. I’m sure he thought I was quite mad but then again, I think that’s the way they feel about us mzungus in general.

And the tea was just fine. Not delicious, not wondrous, like a wicked gin-and-nonsense, but fine nonetheless.

Calvin's .500 double Rigby, the same gun his grandfather and father hunted with. Photo by David Lansing.

We were talking about hunting. And how some people, including Calvin Cottar, who owns a tourist camp on the southeast border of the Masai Mara Reserve, think that the best way to save the wildlife in Kenya is to bring back trophy hunting (which was banned in 1977).

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Wildlife has no value to the average Kenyan. Well, how can that be, you wonder, since Kenya has these wonderful wildlife parks and reserves? Because wildlife belongs to the state. And the only people who make money from ecotourism (i.e., photography safaris) are the Kenya government (and very little of this money ever makes it back to the local tribes) and the lodge operators. And as incidences of conflicts between people and wildlife increase, the animals are always going to lose.

As an example, in just one of the areas adjacent to the Masai Mara Reserve—the Koyiaki Ranch—the number of Masaai bomas or villages increased from 44 in 1950 to 368 in 2003, while the number of huts increased from 44 to 2,735. That puts a lot of pressure on wildlife that breaks down fences, damages crops, degrades water supplies, and threatens livestock and humans. So of course they’re not opposed to killing those animals. As a result, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service, “the (Masaai) country has lost a huge number of carnivores including lions, cheetahs, hyenas, and wild dogs” as well as hartebeest, impala, and other hoofed animals.

So what’s this got to do with hunting? Well, let’s take a look at elephants.

Some of the 2 tons of ivory and 5 rhino horns seized at the Nairobi airport on August 24.

In 1977, Kenya banned elephant hunting. But that didn’t stop the demand for ivory. So poachers began butchering the herds. In less than two decades following the ban on hunting, Kenya’s elephant herd went from about 150,000 to less than 6,000.

Botswana, on the other hand, permitted big game hunting and in the same period of time, their elephant herd has quadrupled. In 1980, Zimbabwe had 40,000 elephants. That number more than doubled until around 1990 when Mister Nutso, Robert Mugabe, took over as president (the government claims they currently have 100,000 pachyderms in Zimbabwe, but the government there claims a lot of things). The point is that elephant populations have increased in countries that allow trophy hunting and decreased in Kenya where hunting isn’t allowed.

But the key to that is the germ of an idea from a ridiculously-named program called CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programmed for Indigenous Resources) under which the people living on communal lands claim the right or proprietorship to the wildlife. Thus the money made from trophy hunting goes back to the local population (and this same thing is being done in South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, and Botswana).

So now let’s take this general information and make it specific. As I wrote a few days ago, the hero of Lewa Wildlife Conservancy and Namunyak Conservancy, where Sarara is located, is Ian Craig who, twenty years ago, watched shifta bandits slaughter an entire family of elephants and, as a result, cut a deal with the local Samburu community and, in 1997, set up this little tented camp, Sarara, which is wholly owned by the local Samburu community. And now elephants, and other wildlife, have returned to both Lewa and Namunyak.

Which is great. Because the Samburu have discovered that they can make more money through ecotourism than they can from poaching wildlife. But, I asked Ian Craig the afternoon we had lunch together, what will the Samburu do if the price of ivory continues to skyrocket (in the last eight years, it’s gone from about $100 per kilo to $1,800 on the black market)?

“I worry about that,” he admitted. “If that happens, our model for community conservancy here would very much be at risk.” Then he went on to tell me that last year, when the price of ivory started going up again, they lost 21 elephants around Sarara. “But the community got together and sent out armed rangers and stopped it. Because they were invested in the elephants and it still made more sense for them to protect them than to kill them. But if the price (of ivory) continues to go up? I honestly don’t know what would happen. They might decide it made more sense to poach the elephants.”

Here’s the way Calvin looks at it: “It’s true that wildlife does well in places like Sarara and Lewa. But they don’t do well outside of parks and conservancies and before long there will be nothing left. The number of elephants we have seen here may very well still be present in twenty years—but we can’t sit in our lodge and look at elephants here while outside of areas like this, the wildlife is quickly being decimated. Because in the end, all we’ll be left with are urban areas ringing unnatural game ranches.

“I think the only way to save the animals, in the long run, is to give ownership of the animals to the local tribes and let them charge a fee for hunting. Then it’s to their benefit to conserve the animals. Just as is done in countries like Botswana. Otherwise, in the end, the local population will continue to allow the wildlife to decline in numbers. Think about it: Why would they not?”

Calvin thinks you might have to shoot these guys to save them. I'm starting to think he's right. Photo by David Lansing.

Calvin and I have been talking about hunting. A lot. As in The only way to save the wildlife in Kenya is to once again allow hunting.

I would never have imagined a month ago that I would agree that maybe the only way to save the elephants is to shoot them, but I do.

Here’s the thing: Kenya is losing about 4% of their wildlife every year, mostly from land use change. What does that mean? It means that there is pressure on the animals from Kenya’s exploding population. And the government feels pressured, understandably, to do more for the people and less for the animals.

When I was in Nairobi, I just happened to pick up a magazine in my room at Tribe called SWARA: The Voice of Conservation in East Africa. I’m flipping through it, looking at all the nice photos of elephants and rhinos and such and here’s this article, based on a BBC News story, reporting that in the Mara giraffe numbers are down by 95%, 80% for warthogs, 76% for hartebeest, and 67% for impala.

I don’t want you to think I’m making these numbers up so here’s a source from the study that was used in the BBC report. Take a look at it. There are skeptics as far as these numbers are concerned (and I’m one of them), but whether it’s 95% or 50%, that’s still a lot of giraffes, isn’t it?

Now if you actually look at this link regarding the collapse of wildlife in the Mara, you’ll see that the declines are “linked to rapid growth of Maasai settlements around the reserve.”

In other words, pressure from the increase in the number of settlements around the Mara. Animals and people need the same thing: water, food, and land. If one population (people) increases, another population (say, giraffes) has to decrease. It’s just common sense.

So, you wonder, what has this got to do with hunting?

The way things are right now in Kenya, the wildlife has no value to the native population. Lions, leopards, and cheetahs kill their livestock. Elephants, rhinos, and buffs destroy their fields and eat their crops. Everything else drinks their water, eats the grasses their cattle would eat, and takes up the land where they want to live. There is no value to them in conserving wildlife because wildlife does nothing but cause them problems.

I want to quote the arguments of a Samburu elder to a Kenyan warden, D.M. Sindiyo, about the Samburu’s feelings towards wildlife:

“We have been told to give way to the elephant, the rhinoceros, the lion, etc., and this has not been our way of life. Many of us have lost children, others have lost relatives and stock to these animals but they are of no value to us any more. The only value of these animals which we knew about is that they used to be the source of our traditionally important trophies, such as kudu horns used for war signals, lion manes worn as a sign of gallantry by the young warriors, buffalo hides for shields, elephant tusks for ornaments worn by the morrans, etc. The use of these things in our daily life is quickly becoming a thing of the past. This value of wildlife being gone, we know of no other value whatever and yet our cattle are being killed and our people either being killed or injured by these animals. We are fined or imprisoned when we kill these animals for food even in times of extreme famine despite the fact that we are told to share our land with them. The presence of these animals in our district means loss of lives and stock every year and nothing else.”

“This value of wildlife being gone, we know of no other value whatever…”

And this gets to the crux of the issue as to why hunting should be allowed in Kenya.

(To be continued…)