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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. At night, spotted hyenas, bat-eared foxes, and leopards are often startled by the headlights of approaching vehicles. Everywhere are piles of soccer ball–sized turds—elephant dung.

After crossing the river, the track wends along a small flat, where brilliantly hued lilac-breasted rollers preen on acacia branches. The road then veers up a steep hill, skirts a ridge, and terminates abruptly at Sungelai, the home of Laurence Frank—a research associate of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California and one of East Africa’s foremost predator researchers.

The structure is literally built into a cliff: a sprawling assemblage of native stone and lumber, with great plate glass windows that overlook the Ewaso Nyiro gorge. It is easy to spend an entire day on the deck beyond the windows, glassing the river course and miles and miles of surrounding hills for game. Nor do you have to look far. Hyraxes have established themselves in the rocks below the house and often lounge on the deck’s railing, importuning handouts. Elephants drift in front of the home almost daily, their utter silence both eerie and intimidating as they pad across the rough, scrubby land. And a small herd of Cape buffalo forages in the immediate area; one old lone bull, with a gigantic boss and wicked, majestically curved horns, typically beds down about a hundred yards from Frank’s bedroom door. At twilight, several hundred white-winged bats stream into the sky from the rafters of the house for their nightly round of foraging, providing a dramatic spectacle for guests enjoying preprandial cocktails.

Sometimes the wildlife does more than display itself in picturesque fashion beyond the plate glass. A few years ago, Alayne Cotterill, a biologist who works with Frank on his predator projects, was sleeping in a bedroom with her two children and her dog. As she often did, Cotterill had left her sliding glass door open to access the cool night breeze that sweeps down the Ewaso Nyiro gorge. She was awakened in the early morning by the frenzied barking of her dog. Turning on the light, she found a large leopard contemplating the family tableau from the foot of the bed. After a moment, the cat turned and walked back out the bedroom door. Because African leopards seldom attack human beings without provocation, Cotterill feels the cat was drawn by her dog. In any event, she now sleeps with her bedroom doors closed.

This is Frank’s headquarters, though he is often away for days or weeks at a time, overseeing predator conservation projects across Kenya. It is his redoubt, the place he uses to work up data, recharge, perhaps even relax a little. Now past sixty, Frank is six feet tall and big-boned, and he still carries a lot of muscle. He has tangled, thinning hair, large eyes that stare fixedly from behind thick spectacles, blunt features, and a prognathous jaw that creates an impression of latent aggression. And indeed, he can be aggressive, a quality that doesn’t necessarily ill-serve him in Africa. Most of the people who know Frank highly respect him, and a few fear him, including some of his own research associates. Normally low-key, even diffident, he quickly gets his back up when encountering stupidity or ineptitude. On more than one occasion, he has not shied from physical confrontation. He characterizes himself as “a putz, a puppy dog, somebody who is all thumbs.” But anyone who has seen him at work—setting snares for lions, engrossed in laboratory procedures, tearing apart a Land Rover transmission, repairing a handgun—can only consider his self-evaluations false modesty. By any consideration, he would seem one of the most competent people on the planet.

In predilection, Frank seems a man from another age. His diction is precise, and he speaks in complete thoughts; his conversation somehow seems meticulously punctuated, down to semicolons, hyphens, and parentheses. Though he is not Scottish, he deeply enjoys the bagpipes and the smokiest, most phenolic of single malt scotches. His manners are almost courtly, though he also is capable of blithely interjecting rude, shocking, or scabrous comments into genteel conversations. He is a lifelong insomniac, a great fan of British spy fiction, an avid duck hunter with indifferent shooting skills, a man who is capable of bivouacking in the bush over his snares for days at a time, augmenting his meager diet with meat salvaged from his “bait”—carcasses of zebras, elands, or camels that have been dispatched by lions or hyenas.

Many things disturb Laurence Frank. He is upset when forced to spend long periods of time away from his five daughters because of his work; the red tape involved in transporting animal specimens from Kenya to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley; his intense chronic lower back pain induced from four decades of pounding around East Africa in Land Rovers; the Byzantine politics of Kenya; the opinions of both opponents and friends; and the general vagaries of fate. But perhaps nothing upsets him more than the decline of his beloved predators.

Frank made his academic bones through seminal research on spotted hyenas, focusing largely on social organization and the role masculinizing hormones play in female development and group dynamics.

He is a cofounder of a captive spotted hyena project at the University of California, Berkeley, initiated to investigate their endocrinology and behavior at close range. The project is ongoing, with the animals housed in spacious compounds at a site in the Berkeley hills; on still nights, their hoots and gibbering resound down the slopes and vales. Spotted hyenas, Frank avers, are among the most intelligent and socially sophisticated of animals. Some of the animals that reside at the Berkeley compound he has raised from cubs. It is an alarming experience to see him casually clamber into a compound with a large dominant female hyena and playfully wrestle her, knowing her jaws could snap his femur with a casual twitch of her masseter muscles. He bars visitors from sharing his fun. “She knows me,” he said when I asked one time if I could join him with one of the animals. “She grew up with me. Her reaction to you would be—unpredictable.” Frank’s eyes glow when he’s with his animals. A man who inveighs against anthropomorphism, he nevertheless loves—deeply loves—hyenas.

Over the course of the past three decades, Frank’s professional emphasis has shifted from ethology to conservation biology, a change he credits as a logical response to empirical observation. “When the world around you is dying, you can’t simply accept it,” he says, referring to Kenya’s wildlife crash. “You have to act, whether or not it makes a difference.”

Frank has established several predator projects in Kenya, all roughly based on the same template: monitoring the number of lions and hyenas through tracking, telemetry, and local contacts; minimizing depredation of livestock through the promotion of boma (thorn-wood corral) construction and other intensive husbandry methods; and hiring local moran (young warriors) to serve as trackers, community liaisons, and educators. Frank would characterize his success as moderate at best, but others are more generous, particularly in Laikipia, where his work with ranchers on private holdings and with Maasai elders on communal tribal homelands has resulted in a generally stable population of lions and spotted hyenas. On Mugie, a forty-nine-thousand-acre ranch that combines cattle and sheep production with ecotourism on the northern Laikipia Plateau, lions have become a profit center; not coincidentally, Mugie’s ranchers are active participants in Frank’s program. Mugie supports about ten to fifteen lions along with its rich assortment of other wildlife species, and the interaction of the big cats with their prey is a major attraction for visitors. It’s easy to see why: observing lions is a much more intimate experience at Mugie than it is on the Serengeti or Maasai Mara, where you have to jockey with ten to twenty minivans to catch a glimpse of a pride. During one trip to Kenya, I passed a couple of days with Frank on Mugie, and much of the time was spent with the lions. On one occasion we observed them, at close quarters, gorging on a zebra kill; on another, we darted a young male and fitted him with a telemetry collar. Besides Frank and me, there were just a couple of his associate researchers, the ranch manager Claus Mortensen, and the wildlife. The experience is an indelible and treasured memory.

FIGURE 3. Laurence Frank takes tissue samples from an anesthetized lion at Mugie Ranch, Laikipia. Note the firearms: attacks are always a possibility during fieldwork with lions. (Glen Martin)

Still, frustration is part of Frank’s job description. A few ranchers continue to evaluate lions, hyenas, and leopards according to the old Game Department definition of “vermin” and eliminate them remorselessly. And in southern Kenya among the Maasai, the fierce opposition to predator conservation has been daunting. But even while trying to change hearts and minds in Maasailand, Frank says he understands their position.“The Maasai are a deeply conservative people,” he says.“Their resistance to change has allowed them to maintain cultural cohesion. And the focal point, the node of Maasai culture, is cattle. They believe God has delivered all the world’s cattle to their care. They love them, sing to them. Cattle aren’t just a store of wealth, a symbol of wealth—they are wealth, the best of all possible currencies. The Kenyan shilling is considered a poor if sometimes acceptable substitute for a cow.”

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, has become a kind of de facto troubleshooter for ranchers and pastoralists with predator problems. On one occasion, I accompanied him to a Laikipia ranch that reportedly supported a rabid spotted hyena. Rabies is endemic among East Africa’s predators and sometimes poses as much of a threat to local hyena populations as poisoning does; Frank is anxious to do what he can to control the disease at any opportunity. On arriving at the ranch, Frank conferred with the owner, who directed him to a brushy river course. It didn’t take long to find the hyena—a relatively young male; we approached it easily as it staggered along the riverbank, shivering and whining, before disappearing into thick brush. Frank loaded his short-barreled 12-gauge pump shotgun with rifled slugs and set off in pursuit; I was timorous at the prospect of encountering a rabid hyena in heavy vegetation, so elected to stay behind. In short order there was a single shot. I investigated, to find Frank standing over the dead hyena, which he had dispatched with a slug placed behind the shoulder. He seemed deeply saddened. “I hate killing these guys,” he said as he prepared to drag the carcass to his Land Rover and ultimately to his lab for the usual battery of samples and tests. “It makes me feel incredibly bad when I have to do it. They are such wonderful animals.” He sighed deeply. “Sometimes there’s simply no alternative.”

On another occasion, Frank was called to a ranch to pick up a leopard. The couple who owned the property—amiable quasi New Agers who combined modest cattle production with some low-key ecotourism—had captured the animal in a box trap after it had eaten their favorite dog. They didn’t want to kill the cat; they simply wanted it gone. Frank and I arrived, and we bent down and looked into the box trap. The leopard, which had been crouched in the gloom at the far end of the trap, made an enormous leap and slammed against the gate, claws extended, teeth bared, spittle flying, eyes lambent with green fire. The entire trap shook with the impact, and a snarl that sounded like an overrevving F-15 split the air. The charge was so abrupt and frightening that I felt any number of internal organs loosening, but Frank merely evinced mild interest. “Aw, poor guy,” he said. “Look—he broke off a canine. They get into these box traps, and they tear themselves up trying to get out. Box traps are really a terrible way of dealing with predators; our snares are much more effective and humane. The animals can’t damage themselves, and you can anesthetize them and release them easily.”

FIGURE 4. Laikipia Predator Project researchers take measurements and tissue samples from an anesthetized leopard that had been killing dogs. It was captured in a box trap by local ranchers. (Glen Martin)

After considerable effort, Frank managed to inject the animal with an anesthetic. Once the leopard conked out, Frank took tissue samples and buckled a telemetry collar around its neck, then loaded the limp, drooling, and utterly unconscious animal into the back of the Land Rover. We drove over rutted tracks through the bush for about an hour, to a site Frank felt was far enough away from human habitation to give the leopard a chance at staying out of trouble.

“Of course, we’re releasing it in another leopard’s territory—every place around here is a leopard’s territory—so he could get killed,” Frank said. “But what are you going to do?” Just as he was unhitching the tailgate to the Land Rover, a truck drove up. It was an acquaintance of Frank’s, a local cattle rancher who loathed predators and disapproved of efforts aimed at their preservation but was nevertheless on good terms with the biologist. They stood and talked for a while—too long, as it turned out.

After an extended palaver, Frank scooped up the leopard in his arms, still chatting with the rancher. A low, deep snarl emanated from the cat. Frank looked down, and the leopard looked up at him peevishly. The anesthetic was wearing off. “Um—I think we have a situation here,” Frank said. The cat abruptly voided its bladder, soaking Frank’s shirt with pungent urine. Its snarl waxed in volume and rose in timbre.

The rancher almost did a back flip as he vaulted behind Frank’s Land Rover. He pulled a compact semiautomatic pistol from a holster at the small of his back and shakily pointed it at Frank and the leopard. Along with their taste for dogs, African leopards are known for unmitigated ferocity if cornered or wounded. It is not uncommon to hear of multiple maulings—leopards chewing and clawing through a group of people, one after another, before escaping, rather than taking the most direct and expeditious route for egress.

The leopard’s flanks had begun twitching now; its lips pulled back from its teeth, and its yowls grew louder. Its eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets. Frank, meanwhile, kept the ninety-pound animal nestled securely in his arms. He walked calmly around the truck and proceeded fifty yards or so into the bush, where he gently placed the leopard on the ground at the edge of a small clearing. The rancher muttered imprecations and holstered his pistol. Frank rejoined us; he stank abominably of cat urine. We watched as the leopard got shakily to its feet, glanced darkly at us, and skulked off into the bush.

FIGURE 5. Laurence Frank prepares to release the aforementioned leopard to the wild. The cat was regaining consciousness when this shot was taken, and worries were growing that it would begin mauling people. (Glen Martin)

“Gee,” said Frank. “That went well, didn’t it?”

By any measure, Frank has accomplished real things on the ground in Kenya. He has built good relations with tribal people, white ranchers, and lodge owners. He has had great success in eliminating the Furadan poisonings that were wiping out predators across the country. As a persistent, though never didactic, advocate for conservation, he is changing human reactions to lions and hyenas one person at a time. Pessimistic by nature, he is quick to characterize his life’s work as bootless and unproductive, but there is no doubt Kenya’s predators would be in even worst straits if he had not been in their corner for the past forty years.