Lion Guardians

Category: Donations received | Date: Dec 27 2008 | By: lionguardians

I hope you had a great Christmas. I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who donated to us in December. I know it is a difficult time of year to donate as there are so many other things to spend money on, so thank you to all of you who helped the Lion Guardians this month with your donations:

Black C, Loki Q, Anna M, Kevin C, Jaime E, Andrew P, Marianne W, Jessica F, Adrienne H, Pirjo I, Julie H, Mary B, Hashi H, Roseanne T, Pirjo I, Brenton H and Jia L. To those of you who bought Christmas certificates - I hope your gifts were well received. If you have any photos of your friends or family with their certificates I’d love to see them!

Thank you for helping save these beautiful animals, and helping the people that live with them.

I also wanted to let you know that wildlife vet and author Jerry Haigh has written about our success over the year in his blog. Have a read!

Tags: blog, christmas gift, donate, donor, jerry haigh, Kenya, lion, lion conservation, Lion Guardians, lions, Maasai, masai

One response so far

Category: ways you can help | Date: Jul 25 2008 | By: lionguardians

I hope you enjoyed finding out about each Lion Guardian, their personalities and backgrounds, and how dedicated they are to helping save the remaining lions here. The Guardians are really happy that they have all been introduced, and that you were interested in reading about them.

What is so great about the Lion Guardians, is that they have all been on lion hunts, and most of them have killed lions before, but now they have changed their attitudes completely and are trying to do everything they can to save the lions here and to change the attitudes of their communities towards wildlife too. Here are Nemasi’s cubs - some of the lions they protect.

And the fantastic thing is that they are so successful! Even elders who used to hate carnivores with a passion are listening to the Lion Guardians and have stopped killing carnivores. It is such great news for the wildlife here in this un-protected area.

The project has done so well here on Mbirikani that we hope to start it up in neighbouring areas too. The lions here don’t know that there are boundaries between ranches, and when they move to other areas there is a chance they will be killed. Recently a lion was speared to death on the neighbouring ranch where we hope to start the program. Here is another one of our collared lions - a male called Kesayou.

But first we really need to raise funds. This is where you come in! We are hoping that we can get all our Guardians on Mbirikani group ranch sponsored, before we try to start the program up elsewhere. So far we have 2 Guardians out of the 9 sponsored. We understand that sponsoring a Guardian is a lot to ask. Any one-off donations you can give will help the Lion Guardians too.

If you know anyone else who you think might be able to help, please pass the blog address on to them and tell them about the program. You can also join the facebook cause and invite all your friends to join too. The more people that know about the Lion Guardians, the more chance we have of raising funds to help the program go on. Please spread the word!

Maybe you could start a syndicate among your friends or colleagues where you get together and each donate a smaller monthly amount to sponsor a Guardian? These are just some suggestions! We are grateful for any size of donation you can give us. Thank you so much for your support. All the Lion Guardians pass on their thanks to the blog readers!

Tags: donate, Kenya, lion, lion conservation, Lion Guardians, Maasai, masai, sponsor

7 responses so far

Category: ways you can help | Date: Jul 14 2008 | By: lionguardians

The Lion Guardians program employs 9 Maasai warriors (murrans), whose job it is to protect the remaining wild lions and other carnivores on Mbirikani Group Ranch. They do this by monitoring the movements of carnivores, and by helping their communities, to stop conflicts between humans and carnivores.

They also work with other murrans to prevent further killings. Since the program started the Lion Guardians have actively prevented over ten hunting parties from killing lions. During the same time period, over 20 lions have been killed in surrounding group ranches by murrans. For more information on the work of the Lion Guardians please read the About Lion Guardians page.

We are currently trying to get all of our Lion Guardians sponsored, so that the program can continue to run. The cost of this sponsorship is $95 US a month per Guardian. This pays their wages as well as covering monthly costs such as credit for mobile phones, transportation costs, and the administration and other costs involved in running the project.

Over the coming days, we will be posting a profile of each of our Lion Guardians, in the hope that each will be sponsored. To sponsor one of the Guardians, please add a ‘1′ in the Sponsor a Guardian QTY box under ‘Donate Monthly’ and click on the ‘DONATE MONTHLY’ button. Afterwards you can add a comment about which Guardian you would like to sponsor, if you have a particular one in mind. Ritei and Olubi have already been sponsored, thanks to Richard and Jia.

Even if you can’t afford to sponsor a Guardian there are other things you can do to help us. We are very grateful for any donation you can give to the project and you can also help us by telling everyone you know about the campaign - family, friends and colleagues - maybe even ask your place of work if they are interested in sponsoring one of the Guardians. In return for their support we can add their logo and a link to their site on this blog.

Thank you for your support, and keep returning to the blog to read the profiles of all our Lion Guardians.

Tags: donate, Kenya, lion, lion conservation, Lion Guardians, Maasai, masai, sponsor

4 responses so far