It is fascinating reading Peter Beard's famous book, "The Last of the Game". It is only by reading such books that one begins to understand how prolific the wildlife of Kenya (and indeed other parts of Africa) must once have been. And how quickly it has been removed (70 years give or take) to make way for expanding human populations and their needs. This is a process which must have been repeated across most of the world at one stage or another, hence the almost total lack of large mammals and carnivores across most parts of Europe, America and significant portions of Asia. It should be a lesson to us all - if we are not careful, another 50 years in the same vein and the (still great) herds of wildlife across Eastern Africa will have been extirpated forever.
It is for that reason that we see so much promise in the livestock/wildlife integrated system that we practice on Ol Pejeta. Thus wildlife is conserved, food for a hungry nation is produced, productivity from the land is maximized, people are employed and taxable revenues are generated. But let us not make the mistake of thinking that such a system of integration is new. The pastoral peoples of Africa have practiced something similar for eons, albeit when human populations were far less and the pressure upon land correspondingly low.
And, as Peter Beard describes, Laikipia ranchers have been wrestling with the subject for years; writing about Lariak estate in the 1960's: "The estate, vast as it was, was stocked to capacity and the grazing needs of the ever increasing herds were fast depleting it; moreover, thousands of zebras of the plains and water holes were reducing the sizeof Colville's domestic herds. To divide the land into measured and controllable paddocks of about 5000 acres each, 365 miles of expensive fencing had to be constructed. But when the Cape buffalo came out of the forest at night to graze, they would invariably knock the fencing down, and passing elephants, taking offence at the wire, would calmly pull up a few wires of it so that in the morning it looked as if a trick of the inversion had been played. About $6000 per year were earmarked for repairs. The problem has always been that there is no easy way to raise stock on the same land as wild game. When space becomes a problem, as eventually it does even on estates as large as Lariak, the value of each acre increases, and the only course of action left to profit-minded farmers is to exterminate the wildlife they have been protecting".
Of course the wild game increased so quickly on commercial ranches because their natural predators (lions, hyena and leopard)were not tolerated, given their propensity for killing livestock. Indeed we used to control these species on Ol Pejeta. But that has been our recent breakthrough. Now that we have found ways to protect cattle from predators (particularly at night using predator proof enclosures) and make money - through tourism - from our wildlife, our cattle herds can live with predators (some of the highest densities in Kenya) who, in turn, keep wildlife populations in check. So hopefully the natural balance has been restored and gone are the days when regular culls of wildlife (game control) to "make room" for livestock used to be the norm.
Whilst we feel our integrated system has huge implications for wildlife conservation in East Africa (it it now being taken up across many areas), perhaps other areas of the world could learn similar lessons? Could the livestock farmers surrounding Yellowstone National Park learn to live with and benefit from increasing wolf populations for example?
Natural systems are normally self-regulatory, but humans often distort the balance ultimately at great cost to themselves through diminishing biodiversity; new thinking may help prevent further loss and it seems history may have many lessons to teach us?
