To the Maasai, a lion that kills a cow or goat thus strikes at the very heart of social order and must be eliminated. Moreover, observes Frank, lions remain a means for moran to demonstrate their courage and prowess; though technically proscribed by the governments of both Kenya and Tanzania (where most Maasai live), communal lion hunts conducted by moran equipped only with shields and spears remain commonplace. The tail is kept as a trophy and is considered a great status symbol. “In the past, it wasn’t much of an issue, because there were plenty of lions and relatively few Maasai,” Frank observes. “But the Maasai population has exploded. Currently, you have too many guys poking too few lions with spears. Lions are disappearing wholesale from Maasai territory.”
Exacerbating the situation is the use of the insecticide Furadan as a predator poison throughout East Africa. For years, Frank observes, Furadan has been available at every trading post and small store in rural Kenya and Tanzania, where it sells for less than a dollar a packet. “Everyone knew it isn’t being used for insects,” he says. “It’s an extremely effective predicide. Put it on a kill, and it wipes out lions, hyenas, and leopards very efficiently. Also vultures, jackals—anything else that comes into the carcass.” Furadan availability has only lately been reduced, thanks mainly to CBS’s 60 Minutes, which featured a segment on Frank.
Despite the efforts of Frank and other conservation biologists, lions are in free fall across East Africa, particularly—and ironically, given the Born Free saga—in Kenya (Laikipia being the notable exception). By best estimates, continental populations have plummeted from roughly two hundred thousand two decades ago to perhaps thirty thousand today. Retaliatory killings by pastoralists are the primary cause; a subsidiary but growing threat is the Chinese traditional medicine market. “Tiger bone is a favored remedy, but with tigers disappearing, the Chinese are turning increasingly to lion bone,” Frank observes.
But the underlying reason for the lion decline, says Frank, is even more basic: lions have no value in modern Kenya. Mugie and a few other private ranches that maintain tourist lodges, the national parks, the Maasai Mara National Reserve—these are exceptions to the general rule, places where lions are hanging on because they have a constituency: wealthy tourists and the businesses that cater to them. But across the rest of the country, across most of Africa, lions are liabilities, potential threats to property and human life.
“It’s all very well to admire lions from the safety of a minivan,” observes Ian Parker. “But if you’re a pastoralist living in a little manyatta [semipermanent camp] deep in the bush with nothing to your name but a few cows, it’s another matter altogether. You’re not just worrying about lions taking your stock and depriving you of your livelihood, though that’s a constant concern; you’re also worried they’ll kill you or your family members outright.”
Frank thus measures his success to the degree that he has been able to reinvest lions with value. On Mugie and other Laikipia ranches that support his work, the lions are part of the tourist draw. And in Amboseli National Park and surrounding lands, the Lion Guardians project, which employs Maasai moran to track and protect lions, is yielding positive results, not because the Maasai have abruptly changed their general view of lions, but because they derive considerable benefit from the program. Initiated by two of Frank’s associates, Leela Hazzah and Stephanie Dolrenry, the Lion Guardians program has proved so successful at Amboseli that the researchers plan to extend it to the Maasai Mara.
Lion Guardian participants receive a salary and are given cell phones—tremendous incentives in Maasailand. Jobs that pay hard currency are exceedingly difficult to come by in the region, and though the Maasai generally are disdainful of modern technology, they have taken to cell phones enthusiastically; the devices allow tribal members to stay in close touch with far-flung relatives and, even more critically, allow them to track cattle prices in local markets. Before the advent of cellular coverage in Maasailand—placing an international call from a mobile phone is now as easy in the middle of the Serengeti as in Manhattan—tribal members had to take whatever price was offered when they brought their stock to market. Typically, they were low-balled. Now they can monitor prices at various markets throughout Kenya and Tanzania, delivering their animals only when given a quote that suits them.
But the Lion Guardian program also provides Maasai moran with something they value far more than money or advanced technology: prestige. Though the Maasai will typically exterminate any predators they encounter, lions are inextricably intertwined with their lives, culture, and mythos. Lions are the supreme test of a moran and hence help define what it means to be Maasai. “When a Maasai man attains elder status, usually in his early forties, he is expected to spend his days advising, drinking beer, and telling tales of past deeds,” says Rian Labuschagne. “It is considered the appropriate progression for a man who has spent a dangerous youth and early adulthood caring for livestock and defending the tribe.” And the stories that confer the highest status to the teller, says Labuschagne, are those that concern successful cattle raids against enemies—and lion hunts.
The Lion Guardian program accommodates this almost reflexive need of young Maasai males to interact with lions, says Frank: “It keeps them associated with lions, which ultimately gains them great respect from other tribal members. They’re out in the field, tracking lions, informing locals when lions are in the area, helping herders build bomas to protect their stock. The fact that we offer paying jobs is a tremendous incentive, but the opportunity to interact with lions on an ongoing basis, allowing the moran to gain the admiration of their relatives and friends, is also a real attraction.” The moran of the Lion Guardian corps are thus able to collect their own heroic tales of lion encounters, to be told when they are elders—but tales with a crucial difference from those of earlier Maasai culture. In these stories, the lions have been transformed from the killer, the despoiler, the implacable enemy of the people, to something of inherent value.
That, at least, is the hope; no one is less certain of positive results from any conservation initiative than Frank, who has spent more than forty years adjusting the ideals of his youth to the hard realities of Africa. But if he is not certain of success, he is most certainly convinced of failure if innovative programs are not instituted to preserve predators; and the Lion Guardians, he emphasizes, is just such a program. It works. “It has been successful beyond anyone’s wildest hopes,” he says. “It has totally halted lion killings in the areas where it’s implemented. The aftermath of the [2009–10] drought shows this. In a four-month period, eighteen lions were killed in one small area [five hundred square kilometers] that had no Guardians—and none were killed in a thirty-five-hundred-square-kilometer area patrolled by Guardians. That’s a stunning achievement.”
Frank also maintains that successful lion conservation programs paradoxically must involve the elimination of selected animals, specifically chronic livestock killers. If a particular lion develops a taste for beef or mutton—something that often occurs when injury or age renders an animal unfit to take wild game—then it must be killed, Frank says. There can be no alternative: once a lion keys into livestock as primary prey, rehabilitation is almost impossible—and, in the larger scheme of species conservation, hardly worth the time and money required for even a successful attempt. Too, Frank’s initiatives depend on the goodwill of the people who live in lion country.
“Candidly, cattle killers are usually created by bad livestock practices,” he observes. “When people construct good bomas and really watch their animals, there’s usually no problem—the lions never learn to kill stock. But when a lion does go bad, we’ll work with the affected rancher or pastoralist and the Kenya Wildlife Service to eliminate it. It’s very rare that it comes to that, but we have to be willing to help out when it does. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have any credibility. We’re good at tracking and snaring, and we’ve put telemetry collars on a lot of predators, so sometimes we can locate the problem animal right away.”
Frank, in fact,