Lions and People
For the Rebuilding the Pride project group following lions in their sturdy Land Cruiser, there’s not much danger involved in a hard night’s work away from their Lale’enok Resource Center base. For the inhabitants of the study site of Olkiramatian and Shompole Group Ranches, however, the threat of lions is clear and present.

Visiting the center for a few days, I found myself sitting atop the Land Cruiser alongside the group’s regulars on Congo Road. With our floodlights trained on a pride made up of two adult females and their eight cubs, we were able to enjoy the coolness of the night after another hot Magadi day. The lions ate happily away on a waterbuck, occasionally snarling at each other in competition over some part of the meat. The sounds of children playing in a nearby boma drifted to us on the back of a light wind.

We had been watching the pride for over an hour when we all detected the sounds of a motor growing closer, soon followed by the glow of a headlight ahead of us at the bend in the road. If the piki piki continued its approach along the road, it would pass not three feet from these ten carnivores. We flashed the headlights of our car and shook the floodlights in the direction of the motorcycle, hoping it would understand and stop. But the sound continued, grew, until, just before the bend when the vehicle would enter our line of vision, the lions scampered. With them hidden now under the cover of the bush, the driver passed by without knowing his own luck, and continued on his way.

In recent years, the lion population in Olkiramatian and Shompole has seen unique growth to around fifty individuals today. Meanwhile, lion numbers across Kenya have been declining. In an area also inhabited by people, why are the lions thriving here and how do they interact with the human population? These are some of the questions that the Rebuilding the Pride group is studying, headed by Guy Western and research assistant Lily Maynard, and supported by Steven Kelempu, Peter Sariamu, and a cadre of game scouts as well as other knowledgeable locals.

Studying lion movements is only one facet of the Rebuilding the Pride program, which Guy designed as a community initiative to understand why lions and people have been able to coexist in this area of Kenya. The team of researchers and locals also collect livestock herding information in order to understand which herding techniques prove the most adept at mitigating clashes with predators. In sharing this knowledge as well as an understanding of why lions move as they do and what makes lions afraid of humans, the program will not only promote the continued co-existence of predators and people in Olkirmatian and Shompole, but might also be used as an example to other areas in the country where people live amongst predators.

Working through the South Rift Association of Landowners, the Rebuilding the Pride team has already earned the respect of the Olkiramatian and Shompole communities by helping individuals where they have the resources to do so: when they received a call that there was an injured cow inside the Shompole Conservancy, they drove deep into the conservancy to locate it, load it on the back of their truck, and return it to its owner. That man cooked and ate the cow, which was otherwise useless with its injury. Though some lions might have missed out on a tasty meal that day, because of the actions of this Lale’enok project group, the cats avoided the possibility of spurring the cow’s owner to retaliation, as well as the likelihood of turning human sentiments about them towards hostility.

Compiled by: Anna Sakellariadis