Nigel Richardson meets a biologist and Tusk award nominee with an innovative plan to save the big cat
Amy Dickman with young Barabaig tribesmen who help track and protect lions from attacks by villagers
During the first night that Amy Dickman, an English conservation biologist,
spent in Ruaha, Tanzania, 30 stone (190kg) of killing machine parked itself
on top of her. She was sleeping in a tiny pup tent in the bush when a lion
seeking a pillow lay down on top of it, crushing her arm and giving her the
most “deeply terrifying” moments of her life.
Dickman survived, not only to tell a great yarn but also to become a champion
of the lions of Ruaha, which constitute one tenth – around 3,400 – of
Africa’s entire lion population. “People are really amazed that a species as
iconic as the lion is under threat,” she says. “They think that because
everyone goes on safari and sees them, somehow they are stable – and they
really are not.”
Now her innovative work to protect the lions and other carnivores of the
remote East African wilderness has won international recognition with her
nomination for the Tusk Award for Conservation, the winner of which will be
announced next Tuesday at a ceremony in London attended by Tusk’s patron,
the Duke of Cambridge. Dickman, the Kaplan Senior Research Fellow at the
Wildlife Conservation Research Unit in Oxford University’s Department of
Zoology, is the third and final nominee to feature in these pages.
In 2009, she set up the Ruaha Carnivore Project, based at a camp a few miles
outside the border of Ruaha National Park, among pastoralist communities
mainly belonging to the Maasai and Barabaig ethnic groups. The project now
has a permanent staff of 12, who are carrying out ecological research in a
severely understudied area of Africa – but Dickman wasn’t among them when I
visited recently as she is currently back in England, having just had a baby
(I interviewed her separately for this article).
The project camp is located in the middle of an age-old conflict zone. Within
Ruaha National Park lions live harmoniously, but on its edges, where
villages, grazing lands and bush come together, they share their habitat
with people. The consequences have been negative on both sides – lions
killing livestock, lions being killed in retaliation – and the project’s
main aim is to mitigate the conflict. Their motto – “For carnivores and
people” – is a clue as to how they have gone about it.
“What we’re trying to do is conserve carnivores through community
conservation, not only to protect carnivores for their own sake but so they
provide long-term benefit for local people,” says Dickman. In five years she
and her team have achieved startling results: retaliatory killing of lion
is down by at least 80 per cent and depredation of livestock has been more
than halved.The first problem she and her team addressed was the security of livestock enclosures, known as bomas. Most lion attacks were taking place at night when herders had placed their goats and cattle within bomas made of circles of thorn bushes – a barrier that lions, in particular, are able to overcome with ease. The project has been introducing sturdy, predator-proof bomas (86 so far) which have proved totally effective. But protecting livestock on their daytime grazing grounds remains a problem.
Dickman may have found the answer in Namibia, where Anatolian shepherd dogs keep leopard, cheetah and other carnivores at bay. As part of a trial, three Anatolian shepherds have been given to herders in Ruaha who have lost the most goats and cows, including a Maasai called Mr Matambile of Tungamalenga village. The dogs have yet to encounter lions but the verdict so far is positive. “It helps a lot, not only at home, even when we go out for grazing,” Matambile told me as he stood outside his new, predator-proof boma, proudly patting Shujaa, his one-year-old Anatolian shepherd.
All this amounts to sound practical intervention but the key to Dickman’s approach – and, indeed, to all progressive conservation practices – is to turn hunters into conservationists. Ruaha Carnivore Project's partnership with Panthera and the Lion Guardians project in Kenya means that villages are now protected by “lion guardians” – expert trackers who, for a salary, monitor the movements of predators, warn livestock owners if trouble is heading their way and persuade villagers to call off lion hunts.
Who best to fulfil this role? Young warriors who by tradition have killed lion, not just in retaliation for livestock depredation but for their own social aggrandisement. “It gives them social status through other means – a way of making them key people,” says Dickman.
These elements – the bomas, the dogs, the guardians – are shored up by a programme of benefits to the community. Local schools have been twinned with schools in the US and UK, which brings in books and equipment; the project puts six “Simba scholars” – students taken from the pastoralist communities – through secondary school each year; while herders receive veterinary care for their livestock and a local clinic has been given medicines and equipment.
All this has certainly won the minds of Ruaha’s traditional pastoral communities but another initiative – as simple as it is persuasive – is winning their hearts. Despite living within 20 miles of the border of Ruaha National Park, most villagers had never been there and had never seen “dangerous wildlife” in anything but a negative and threatening context. So the project takes them on game drives in the park, to observe lion, in particular, in relaxed family groups. “One of the reactions we get is, 'I didn’t know lions could be gentle’,” says Dickman. “They’re amazed they have that capability. It’s a real shift in attitude.”
The shifting of attitudes, not just here but across Africa, will be crucial to the survival of this most charismatic of big cats. “They are undoubtedly very difficult animals to live alongside, but as human-dominated land is so important for the remaining lion range, it has reinforced to me just how critical community-based conservation is for their future,” says Dickman – who knows better than most what it is to share living space with a lion.
About the Tusk Conservation Awards
The Tusk Trust (tusk.org) is a British charity, with the Duke of Cambridge as its patron, which supports conservation projects in Africa. Its Tusk Conservation Awards, in association with Investec Asset Management, recognise work in the field. In addition to the Tusk Award for Conservation in Africa, sponsored by Land Rover, it will be making an award for lifetime achievement, the Prince William Award for Conservation in Africa, at a ceremony in London on November 25. Next week we profile the winner.
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