The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Into the lion’s den
Africa’s lion population is agonisingly low. In Tanzania, Amy Dickman, a Devon-born conservation biologist, is working to help local tribes live in harmony with these wild beasts, and to save them from all-too-possible extinction. By Jessamy Calkin
Amy Dickman has always been fascinated by big cats, and as a student, on her first project in Tanzania, she felt she had arrived. She had been working with cheetahs in Namibia for six years, and now she would be working with lions. Pitching up at the camp on the edge of the Great Ruaha River, she was impressed with the accommodation: spacious ca nvas tent s built securely on wooden platforms. She was less dazzled when she was shown her own quarters – a small two-man ‘pup tent’ of the type that people take to Glastonbury and throw away afterwards – and even less impressed when she noticed tracks in the mud indicating that the tent was parked directly on a hippo trail from the river. So she moved it off the hippo trail and went to bed. But, she says, on such a project, in the daytime you are 95 per cent trained biolog ist and five per cent terrified human. At night it’s the other way round.
Darkness fell, accompanied by the roaring of lions. ‘Relax,’ Dickman told herself, ‘that’s why you’re here, to study lions.’ And it’s a fairly sound theor y that if the tent is zipped up, it appears like a solid object to a lion – one that it is unlikely to broach. But the roars got louder, and closer. Suddenly, there was a very loud roar indeed. Through the cheap material Dickman could see a huge lion silhouetted in the moonlight. ‘He was actually bigger than the tent. I thought, “Oh my God.”’
The lion approached and started sniffing around. Stiff with terror, Dickman began searching surreptitiously for a weapon. She came up with her Leatherman pocket knife. ‘I thought, “If he comes in here, I will slit his throat…”’ – then she looked again and saw his huge shagg y mane, ‘and I realised that the chance of doing that was zero. I put my hand in my bag again and found my deodorant spray. Now I had a plan: I would blind him with deodorant and then stab him.’
The lion leant casually against the tent, sprang back – he had probably thought it was a rock and not expected it to move – then resettled himself comfortably, the whole tent bowing beneat h his weight, so that he was lying on it, and on Dick man’s a r m. The arm that was holding the Leatherman.
Di c k ma n ’s he a r t wa s b e at i ng a s i f it would ex plode. ‘All I had was the deodorant spray, which is obviously a r ubbish lionkilling tool, and it was too risky to wriggle my other hand out, so I just lay there, and a few minutes later I heard him snoring.’ She was trapped, her arm was numb, and the tent became hotter and hotter until she thought she would die of heat exhaustion. In the end she must have passed out. ‘Because the next thing I knew it was morning and there was sunlight streaming in, and the tent was back to its normal shape.’
After that she got her own proper tent with a platform. And she has a similar one now, at her camp in Kitisi village, near Ruaha National Park, though the platform is rather rudimentary. She also has a lavatory that looks like a small brick throne, an open-air kitchen, two operations managers, Tanzanian researchers and several other employees living at what is now the headquarters of the Ruaha Carnivore Project (RCP), established here some eight years ago. And despite that earlier experience, her love for lions is unabated.
But the sad truth is that the lion population in Africa has been decimated: in the past 20 years, numbers have halved. Today, there are fewer than 25,000 wild lions left – making them as rare on the continent as rhinos. And contrary to popula r opinion, t his is not due to high-prof ile issues such as t rophy hunt ing; t he main cause of t he decline is humancarnivore conflict.
Ruaha is, at over 20,000 sq km, east Africa’s biggest national park. But only about half of the lion range is within it. The park is unfenced, and the larger landscape – through which lions and other animals range at will – covers an area of over 50,000 sq km (bigger than Denmark). At certain times of year – when the rain hits, for example – wild prey disperses and conflict spikes on village land. It becomes easier for lions to pick off poorly guarded livestock, which is plentiful here – this is an area replete with cattle.
Among the Maasai and Barabaig tribes in particular, lion hunting is a cultural tradition, with young warriors using it to prove t hei r braver y, accu mulate wealth (cattle are given to them as a reward) and increase their status in the community. It is also a form of retaliation for lions killing livestock. Cattle here are sacrosanct. Goats are cash, cows are savings in the bank. Livestock is used as dowry, investment and means of largesse; it is everything.
Dickman wants to save lions, and conser ve habitat, and benefit the local community. But, as she points out, it would be pat ronising to tell t he local population to protect lions for nothing in return. Why should they? ‘People here don’t care if they never see another lion again – they are worried about where their next meal is coming from; lions are just another threat.’ It is Westerners who want lions, she says, and therefore it is Westerners who should pay for them.
As for the locals, as Dickman says, what it comes down to is making a live lion worth more than a dead one. So one of the aims of RCP is to make it worth the locals’ while to protect lions. ‘All too often, people try to stop wildlife killing without understanding the dynamics, and without giving people meaningful incentives for conser vation. You’re asking for failure then, because the communities don’t engage – yet again they feel disempowered. I’m a big fan of the community-first approach – we need to sort out the root causes of why people are killing lions.’ In Ruaha, Dickman’s research revealed that those root causes include attacks on livestock, people receiving few or no benefits from wildlife presence, and cultural killing of lions. Her team works intensively with 12 villages, but also across 22 villages housing more than 50,000 people, to address all these issues.
Most attacks occur inside poorly const r ucted livestock
The lion leant against Dickman’s tent… and settled on her arm
enclosures, so the project reinforces them with wire. It also gives some families special Anatolian livestock-guarding dogs to protect g ra zing stock. These met hods have markedly reduced attacks, but for long-term conservation, the advantages of wildlife presence have to outweigh any costs.
Villagers voted on what benefits they would most appreciate, and the top three were education, healthcare and veterinary medicine. Therefore, the project twins village schools with international ones to help provide books and materials, and supplies lunches because otherwise the children – many of whom have walked several kilomet res to school – have nothing to eat all day. A nutritious porridge of maize, cornflour, sugar, nuts and milk is served at noon.
Although primar y school is free in Tanzania, secondar y school can be expensive, so many children, especially girls, are not educated beyond the age of 13. RCP has established ‘Simba scholarships’ to enable promising students who cannot afford fees to go to secondary school.
The project also provides high-quality veterinar y medicines and invests in local healthcare, with a focus on maternal and infant care. It provides, too, an unofficial ambulance service, with multiple babies being born in the back of Dickman’s Land Rover.
To reduce cult ura l k i lli ngs, RCP has est ablished Lion Defenders – young warriors who might otherwise have been lion killers, whom it employs in a conservation-focused version of a traditional warrior role. They track lions, chase them away if they are near livestock, help find lost stock and children, and prevent lion hunts.
These initiatives were ver y popular from the outset, but Dickman realised that villagers were attributing the benefits to the project, rather than to the presence of the felines in the first place. To reinforce the link with wildlife, RCP developed community camera trapping, whereby villagers are employed to place remotely triggered camera traps on their land. Each wildlife image captured scores points – based on the number and species concerned – and every three months these points are translated into additional education, healthcare and veterinary benefits for the community. Villages compete against one another, so the village with the most wildlife photographs receives the most additional benefits, although they will all receive some.
This enterprise has been a huge success. There were some initial complaints about the amount of points villages were awarded – 10 for a cheetah or a lion, say, or five for a pangolin – but despite it making no di f ference i n rel at ive ter ms, t here was much more re sponse when th r e e ze r o s were adde d : 10,000 points for a lion, and so on.
Each quarter, there is a celebration in the top-scoring village when prizes are handed over, and this quarter, the presentation is due to t a ke place in Idodi, a few miles along a potholed road from Dickman’s camp. ‘Party time!’ she says, jumping out of the Land Rover. The village is immaculately kept, with bright-pink flowers planted in neat rect a ngles, bordered rat her endea r i ngly by upt ur ned g reen plastic 7 Up bottles. A DJ is setting up a sound system in front of the largest baobab tree I’ve ever seen, and Meritho Katei, an RCP research assistant, has taken it upon himself to be the MC and is dancing enthusiastically with some of the villagers. He grew up near here and has 27 siblings (his father has six wives). A teenager in a wheelchair made out of reconstituted bicycle parts looks on, and behind a table set up with plastic flowers and a pink tablecloth sits Dickman, alongside the village chairmen. The smell of roasting goat is in the air, and all the villagers have turned out to join in the feast.
The proceedings are very protracted, partly because everybody has to introduce themself to the spectators, including me. Dickman makes a speech in Swahili, photographs are taken, and prizes are presented, including a printer and a chair for the school (which has 840 pupils and only seven teachers), medicines for the local clinic and veterinary supplies.
Off to the side, observing proceedings in a slightly diffident manner, are elders from the Barabaig tribe. The villages all have different et hnic compositions, but a round t his a rea, there are a lot of Maasai and Barabaig. The Barabaig are pastoralists, living on the outskirts of the villages, and they are oldschool. They are often know as ‘Mang’ati’, which means ‘the enemy’. They are also, traditionally, avid lion hunters.
When Dickman first came here, in late 2009, she started talking to the villagers, but found it impossible to make contact wit h t he Barabaig. ‘ We went to t heir households and they’d be totally empty – there’d be a fire and a goat bleating – they would have run away. Everyone said to us, “You need to talk to the Barabaig,” and we’d say, “Yeah. How?”’
She made little prog ress, but in 2010, Dickman installed solar panels in her camp, and instantly the Barabaig showed up to charge their phones. ‘They just walked up, not a word, and held out their phones.’ Soon there were queues of people every day. ‘It wasn’t great engagement but it was a start.’
One night, Dickman and her team heard a lot of singing and chanting after what had clearly been a lion hunt. ‘We thought, that’s got to be a celebration of a kill, and we wanted to find out what was happening.’ They drove through the bush towards the noise, as far as they could, then started out on foot.
‘It was a really cloudy night,’ says Dick man, ‘a nd we were walk ing through the bush without torches, which was stupid because it turned out there was cattle rustling going on between the Barabaig and the Maasai, so having people creep up on a household was a bit reckless. All of a sudden, we got this feeling that we were being watched.
‘At t h at moment t he cl o ud s par ted and down came a shaf t of moonlight, and we were totally surrounded by men with spears. Then it was pitch-black again.
‘Msaf ir i [Mg umba, a resea rch assistant] was with us, and he was shouting, “Research! Research! It’s just us – the idiot researchers from down the road – we aren’t trying to steal your cattle!”’
One of t he elders talked to t he team, and a meeting was arranged. They discussed fears on both sides. (It turned out, for instance, that the Ba raba ig had wor r ied about t he pot s in Dick man’s open kitchen,