Game Changer. Glen Martin
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a relatively pricey activity), the loss of public-land hunting opportunities, and habitat loss. But the biggest driver appears to be a shift in the zeitgeist. Hunting is not considered au courant, especially among younger people. This is glaringly apparent in the American media. There are a great many TV shows dedicated to alternative and extreme sports—surfing, snowboarding, motocross, even street luge racing. The participants are young, fit, and attractive. And while there are some hunting and fishing shows on television—there’s even a channel or two devoted wholly to field sports—their presentation and production values are stodgy by comparison, and the hosts and participants are generally middle-aged, paunchy, and anything but sexy. In the most basic terms, the culture that really counts in America—youth culture—has moved decisively against hunting.
The same holds true for urban Africa. As the League against Cruel Sports claims, compromise of any significant degree is probably impossible for anti-hunting and pro-hunting groups. But the organization is wrong when it maintains hunters are winning. The hunters are not winning, including those in Africa. In Nairobi and Johannesburg, hunting is viewed as a colonial relic, something pursued by wealthy white men besotted with delusional fantasies of Hemingway, Ruark, and the Golden Age of the Safari. Even in countries where the hunting tradition is still relatively strong—Tanzania and Namibia, for example—the activity is viewed as a somewhat atavistic rural pursuit and, at best, a source of foreign currency. Hunting big game is not an aspiration of the people who really count in Africa—educated, upwardly mobile, professional urbanites. Thanks to the Internet and cellular technology, Africa is now integrated into world culture in a way that was unthinkable even a few years ago. By way of illustration: I visited Kenya’s Laikipia highlands in 2001. At that time, standard hardwired telephony had just made it to the region. Up to that point, ranchers had communicated by CB radio—or more often, by driving or flying to one another’s homes. I observed that the ranchers seemed somewhat flummoxed by the technology, which was then more than a century old, of course. When they picked up the phone, they had a tendency to say “over” after finishing their part of the conversation, as they would on a two-way radio.
Flash forward eight years. Cell phones are now ubiquitous across East Africa, including in Laikipia and the Maasai Mara. Everyone—city dwellers, ranchers, pastoralists—has at least one cell phone. They are calling, texting, Googling, reading news feeds. They are as exposed to the world—and to global popular culture—as anyone in Paris, London, or New York. Just as it has in the United States, this vastly enhanced access to media hasn’t necessarily raised the level of discourse: a lot of attention seems concentrated on scandal, sex, and crime.
Still, matters of more elevated import percolate through the new African media, including those related to wildlife conservation. The debate in Kenya over reintroducing big game hunting has drawn particular attention. In the countryside, the issue is strictly a matter of shillings and security: conversations with any pastoralist or farmer revolve around protection of livestock from predators, excluding elephants from crops, or the return in meat or money that game animals may yield. In Nairobi, however, the issue is both more complicated and familiar: it sounds a lot like the heated point and counterpoint you’d hear in any American or European city. In 2007, a Kenyan journalist opposed to hunting described it as bored and wealthy Arab royals and Americans potting away at big game while starving children looked on from mudand-wattle huts. While the issue is certainly more nuanced than that, this image contains enough truth to make for a powerful self-propagating message—an idea that is simple, clear, and easy to understand and communicate. Indeed, this portrayal of hunters as callous and blood-crazed neocolonials trying to insinuate themselves back into a country from which they were properly ejected during a war of liberation has resonated dramatically in urban Kenya. Kenyans may not be deeply invested in the doctrine of animal rights, but the injustices of white colonialism still rancor, and big game hunting remains the preeminent symbol of the colonial era.
Thus, the basic conversation on African conservation is changing, driven by new media and reflecting the changing concepts of environmentalism in the world at large. The “old” science-based approach to conservation—dispassionate, data-driven, focused on habitat and suites of species rather than on narratives that anthropomorphize individual animals—is under dire threat. Its adversary is a New Environmentalism founded on the “deep ecology” philosophy articulated a generation ago by the Norwegian mountaineer Arne Naess, but it diverges from Naess’s original doctrine of planetary health in that it focuses on a single component of ecological well-being—the inherent rights of the individual animal—to an inordinate degree. The New Environmentalism is thus more about social, even religious, trends than it is about science. This invests it with a power that science alone will never have, because it is grounded in the heart more than in the mind.
Africa is the ultimate battleground for these dueling conservation concepts. It still has enough wildlife to make the stakes worthwhile. Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, the only other regions with large populations of megafauna, are generally not in this battle. Animal rights groups maintain a presence there, but wildlife management is rigorously codified under federal, state, and provincial law and based on data, not morality. Though good cases can be made that wildlife policies in Alaska and Canada are significantly influenced by political pressure, nothing is likely to shift the argument decisively in favor of animal rights advocates. True, the clubbing of harp seal pups has diminished as a result of international outrage. But all the major terrestrial species—including brown bears, wolves, caribou, musk oxen, Dall sheep, mountain goats, even polar bears—are still hunted. The support for consumptive wildlife management is broad and deep. Hunting in Alaska and the Canadian North is largely considered a birthright.
But Africa is in a state of flux, and new doctrines are not reflexively spurned. Big game hunting has never been a favored activity for most indigenous Africans, with the exception of tribes such as the Wata and the San. Moreover, since it carries the indelible stain of white colonialism, hunting will always be controversial, even in situations in which it is a proven and effective conservation tool. Ecotourism, on the other hand, is appealing for the opposite reason: it has no ties to an oppressive past. In many cases—as will be discussed later—ecotourism can exert deleterious impacts on land and wildlife. And the revenues of many ecotourism enterprises are monopolized by foreign owners and government officials, with few benefits trickling down to local villagers. But as a brand, ecotourism is ascendant. It is allied with the New Environmentalism, with animal rights, with all that is modern, young, and appealing. Hunting labors under an onus imposed by its own name, by a history that appears drear and cruel, by the whiteness and age of its primary practitioners. In the future, poaching will continue in the African game lands; the same can’t be said of legal hunting.
CHAPTER 5
My Cow Trumps Your Lion
The road north from Nanyuki into the rangelands of Laikipia starts out as macadam but quickly turns to dirt. After about twenty miles or so, a side road joins the main highway from the west—a track, really, gouged out of the rock and bush long ago by a small grader or perhaps a gang of men wielding shovels and picks. From the looks of it, the road seems used more by wildlife than motor vehicles; animal tracks are everywhere in the buff-colored dust on the shoulders. Taking even a four-wheel-drive rig down this route is a rough go. Deep gullies and big rocks allow a top speed of perhaps fifteen miles an hour, slower still on the innumerable curves and steep little pitches and grades. The topography here is like a sea abruptly fossilized during a squall: dips and bumps and declivities, hills, scarps, plateaus, abrupt drop-offs, all covered with the ubiquitous thorn-wood scrub that blankets the soil from the slopes of Mount Kenya north through the Horn of Africa.
The game is abundant—more than a layperson would expect for such an arid and spare landscape. Thomson’s and Grant’s gazelles bound away from the road at the approach of a car. Dik-diks seek the shade of every low-hanging shrub. Panicked wart hogs sprint through the bush, their tails erect as semaphores. Hartebeests and oryx graze singly or in small groups. Giraffes extend their necks above the thorn-wood canopy. As the road winds down a slope to a bridge crossing the sluggish Ewaso Nyiro River, waterbucks can be discerned drifting between the fever trees, and troops of baboons forage for grubs and grasses, monitored by alpha males squatting on their haunches. In the deep, stagnant pools, hippos abide.