Lion Guardians

Hi everyone! I’m Anthony Kasanga, the coordinator Lion Guardian Program. Lion Guardians is a joint project of the ‘Living with lions’ initiative and the Ol Donyo Wuas Trust, based in Mbirikani Group Ranch in southern Kenya. . Our work, as the name suggests is to harmonize the existence of lions with that of the pastoral Maasai people living within the group ranch.

As lion guardians, our work involves:
1. Daily contact with the general community where we are involved in activities such as helping out in construction of new ‘bomas’ (thorn branch cattle enclosures), herding, and reporting of livestock predation cases. During such contact we are able to educate people on better boma construction and better herding techniques, all with the aim of reducing the incidence of Carnivore predation.
2. Lion tracking to help in monitoring the predators in the wild. This, we do in conjunction with the Kilimanjaro Lion Conservation Project, a lion research project which is carrying out collaring of lions and researching better and more scientific management of lion-pastoralist interactions.
There are 9 lion guardians employed on this ranch. Each lion guardian lives in his home community and operates from there. All of them are Murrans (warriors). Most of them have participated in traditional lion-hunts (armed with spears) before they were employed as lion guardians.

In the course of our daily activities, we encounter lots of interesting events. The prospect of putting our activities in a blog that other people can view and share our experience is very exciting, especially fellow conservationists who undergo similar experiences.