For impoverished local herders who see only costs and corruption from conservation, breaking the law can seem necessary for survival.
In early December 2015, it was reported that eight lions from the Marsh Pride in Kenya's Maasai Mara National Game Reserve had been poisoned by Maasai herders illegally grazing their cattle there. The Mara reserve is a protected area from which herders are banned.
The deaths were widely reported by Kenyan and international media. Not only was the poisoning a blow to the country's already vulnerable lion population, but the lions had appeared on the BBC's popular Big Cat Diary TV series and in the 1982 book The Marsh Lions:
The Story of and African Pride by Brian Jackman and Jonathan Scott. Scott, a leading wildlife artist, writer and photographer, has followed generations of the pride since 1978, and was one of the presenters of Big Cat Diary.
The poisonings were a huge blow to the Mara's lions and were indicative of the huge and unresolved problems of aligning wildlife conservation and habitat protection with rural livelihoods and the urgent need to raise the incomes of communities across lion range states.
Had it not coincided with major global stories, the killings of the lions had all the ingredients for a re-run of the media-fest that followed the shooting of the lion known as Cecil in Zimbabwe in the summer. Scott attempted to publicise the killings, not as a sensationalist story like Cecil's, but to raise serious issues. He wrote on his blog: "Now we have to honour the lives of those extraordinary big cats by putting things right. The only way to do that is by ensuring that we speak our truth. We must ask those difficult questions and confront the very complex issues that make up the political environment surrounding the Masai Mara. We must do that on behalf of all Kenyans. This is a national issue as well as a local one."
It is. And it is an issue that affects all communities that live around national parks and game reserves across Africa, the wildlife in and around those protected areas, the conservationists and researchers working to preserve species and habitats, and governments which have to make the decisions that affect the balance between human needs and those of conservation. Too often, it is one or the other, rather than a serious attempt to empower local people, benefit them and so provide real incentives for struggling, impoverished rural communities to see wildlife as a benefit rather than an obstacle.
