Wildlife Guardians

James Rule posted a wonderful video and associated blog post about the Lion Guardians of Kenya. The program began in 2006 and is run with communities on the Mbirikani ranch, the Living with Lions project and the Maasailand Preservation Trust. In the past 3.5 years, they have saved 50 lions and given employment to young men on the ranch - young men who would normally be out killing lions. While they are out keeping lions safe, the young men find lost livestock and build bomas/kraals/corals to protect and pen livestock up overnight. What a wonderful idea! I think I could build on that and propose something that could be useful in places where elephants and hippos are a big problem for food security.

Based on my experience working in Mozambique, traveling throughout southern Africa, and reading about wildlife conflict throughout Africa lions are not the problem everywhere. Where I have conducted research, elephants, hippos, and bush pigs raiding crops are the primary problem. Bush pigs can be hunted and eaten - the farmers feel compensated somewhat when they can catch and kill the bush pig causing damage. However, national laws prevent the hunting of elephants and hippos.

Before I can continue with my idea, I need to take a detour to explain a little bit about how animals like hippos and elephants create problems for farmers. Where I work in southern Mozambique, farmers grow crops like sugar cane, bananas, vegetables, rice, and taro near lakes and rivers because the ground stays moist year round. Other crops like corn, cassava/manioc, pineapple, beans, pumpkin, melon, and wild spinaches are grown in drier areas - sometimes up around the homestead so that there is easy access to fields for work and to protect crops at night. Hippos graze from dusk to dawn, and generally consume seedlings growing near to water sources like rivers and lakes. Elephants focus primarily on crops that are near or ready to harvest - corn, sugar cane, etc.

Historically, where I work, people had bonfires in their fields at night to drive out animals, made loud noises to scare away animals, kept packs of dogs, had a person sleeping out in the fields to scare wildlife, and even hunted animals that made a habit out of crop raiding. Hunting would generally drive off populations out of areas where people concentrated. During the colonial period, people would ask the government to remove problem animals. These are traditional methods used throughout many parts of southern Africa to prevent wildlife from raiding crops.

Today, electric fencing around protected areas keeps some of the elephants and hippos in, but not all. And there are still plenty of areas where there are no electric fences. Experiment trials with chili peppers are being conducted in Zimbabwe to keep elephants out of crops, but what about hippos?

So back to the Lion Guardian idea. If there can be lion guardians, why not other types of wildlife guardians? Both young men and women (in Mozambique there is a big emphasis on women serving in the same jobs as men and I have seen a few women reserve guards patrolling the bush alongside men), could be trained to patrol and protect elephant herds as they wander in and out of protected areas. Hippo groups are a little more loyal to their deep water pools, so keeping an eye on them might be more appropriate for fishermen or an individual that would prefer to stay in one place.

The elephant guardians might need to be armed and trained in combat since they could encounter problems with ivory poachers. In Mozambique, the military currently assists reserve and national park guards with poaching patrols in protected areas. This program might be something an elephant/hippo guardian project could build on.

The main thrust of the guardian program needs to focus on crop protection to maintain food security. By keeping an eye on the herds it might be possible to angle them away from farmers' fields and towards waterh***s away from populated places. This might require active chasing of animals away from fields. However, Osborn and Parker (2002) write about other community-based methods that could offer employment to elephant guardians. Guardians could create buffer zones around fields or the entire village to increase sightings of elephant approaches, set up string fences in the buffer zones maybe with noisemakers like cowbells or tin cans to create noise alerts, or even man watch towers in these buffer zones. Maybe some of these same methods could be used in fields adjacent to rivers and lakes that have hippos.

It would make sense to hire local young people to do this work since they would know the region well, and would have the energy and time to spend guarding wildlife. Furthermore, offering legitimate employment might keep some of the young men, who frequently end up poaching to make money, out of the poaching racket. Young women also have a stake in this program as much of the crop production is done by women.

Both hippos and elephants are dangerous animals. Then again, so are lions. If young Maasai men in Kenya can be trained to guard lions and protect their community's herds, why couldn't young people in rural areas from other parts of Africa be trained to guard hippos and elephants and protect their community's crops?