Lion Guardians

Category: Community work, ways you can help | Date: Jan 24 2008 | By: admin

Theresa, it is interesting that you want to know of the socio-dynamics behind the scenes of conservation. We decided to answer you in a post so that everyone else can be informed. The area in the photo is in the neighbouring group ranch of Olgulului. They normally receive the same amount of rain as Mbirikani and are only a short distance away. Typical of the rains in this part of the world though, they are unpredictable, irregular, and thus undependable. Last year Mbirikani was in a similar predicament. Fortunately, despite the borders people can still move their cows across in search of better pastures. Mbirikani at the moment is the refuge for most of the people from this area.

This brings us to crop farming. Precisely because of the reasons above, crop farming is next to impossible in this area. Crops cannot be moved around to follow the rains. To further complicate the scene, they border

Amboseli
National Park

about 5km west of where this photo was taken. In fact, Amboseli is also just receiving its first significant amount of rains. Well, being next to a park, they are in the immediate dispersal area of wildlife. Crops would attract zebra, gazelle, buffalo, elephant…. I guess you understand. All the herbivores are going to attack the crops, if by any luck any of them grow as the parks here are unfenced.

The people in this area do not directly tap into the tourism industry because of a lack of capacity (finance and knowledge). As a result, the only thing they do, and have been doing for centuries, is herding. Time has selected this activity as the main viable enterprise for the Maasai on these rangelands. It one of the reasons wildlife still exist here. If you grow crops in an area, you have to kick out all the wildlife. If you are herding, it is possible to co-exist with wildlife.

To survive today where everything has been converted to a monetary tag, people send their cows to cattle markets tens of kilometers away. Here, the cows are sold and the family can convert the money into their daily needs (food, clothe, and in some cases education) depending on priority.

Water, as Theresa asked, is a big problem across the group ranches. People have to travel long distances to get to a source of water of any kind. In the area pictured (21^st Jan.), they have only one water source (a borehole dug by the Kenya Wildlife Service) a short distance from the park. Everyone else depends on this. When it rains, waterholes that are shared between the people, cows, and wildlife are the easier sources of water.

Anyway, from our perspective, changing to a different source of income, especially crop farming, is not the best option. The better option would be trying to improve the output and gains made from the current economic activity. If there were better breeds of cattle, if there was better animal husbandry, if there is less depredation on the cows,….

This is part of what the Lion Guardian program is working hard at.

Technorati : Olgulului, conservation, socio-economics