My friend Josphat Ngonyo helped save this lion’s life. She was caught by a wire snare, a near casualty of the bushmeat trade in Kenya. While some families used to eat the occasional wild animal for subsistence, the bushmeat trade is big business these days, with poachers catching wild animals for sale to bored or homesick Kenyans in the cities. Snares are rigged of piano wire, old telephone lines, winch cables. They are left along animal paths at head height for zebras and wildebeests. They entrap animals as small as dikdiks — antelopes the size of housecats — and as large as elephants.
Sometimes the poachers leave tainted spikes on the ground, wicked barbs to pierce the souls of pachyderms, with crocodile bile smeared on them. An elephant will die in half an hour after treading on one, says Josphat.
Josphat’s group, Youth for Conservation, has collected and destroyed thousands of snares since 1998. Each snare might kill a hundred animals in its lifetime. Perhaps a hundred thousand animals saved since 1998.
A drop in the bucket.
In a 21 day operation 779 snares were found in an area of 24 sq. km. From our findings, 3-5 percent of snares trap an animal daily. Taking the smaller percentage of 3 it means that 24 animals are killed everyday, 168 weekly, 672 monthly and 8,064 in a year in only a 24 sq. km. area.
Two YfC volunteers walk into the bush, with two armed guards from the Kenyan wildlife agency and two local friends. They find the snares and take them, encase them in concrete so they cannot be used again. They work with former poachers to make artwork from the wires. Today Josphat handed me a small sculpture of a bicycle, four inches tall. How many animals had that wire killed? How many did its reclamation save?
The lioness was lucky. YfC cannot afford to bring a veterinarian along on each trip into the woods. One happened to be there that day, tranquilized the lion, tended to her wounds and cut her loose. More often Josphat and his colleagues must wait for the enraged trapped animals to die before destroying the snares.
They use their private cars on these runs. “Sometimes,” says Josphat, “I drop my wife at work and then head out to the field.” A Land Cruiser would be ideal for them, he says, even a used one.
I listened, thinking of the 4-Runners in the junkyard near my house. Piles of them, and it might take three to make one run.
They need a few impossible extravagances. A laptop. A projector. If each wildlife tourist in Kenya paid five dollars per visit, Josphat says, it would pay for every bit of damage caused by wild animals. Every field uprooted, every bull taken down by lions, every future shilling of wages lost when the family breadwinner is trampled.
That last happens rarely. Kenya has a total ban on hunting, and a large majority of Kenyans support that ban. Even those people whose babies’ nighttime cries perk lions’ ears; even those who lose their year’s crop to elephants. Kenyans know the animals’ fate is theirs.
We walked to lunch: tilapia sandwiches. “It is good to be here,” Josphat told me. “Your people are so advanced.”
If I may hammer a point into the ground:
- A large majority of Kenyans support their country’s total ban on hunting wild animals, for food or sport or industry. Kenyans know the animals’ fate is theirs.
- “It is good to be here,” Josphat told me. “Your people are so advanced.”
I have not posted the photos that would drive you to look away and wince: elephants surviving with severed trunks or dying eaten by hyenas. Gashes and dislocations. Poaching has nearly ceased in the villages where Josphat has worked for some time. The people no longer allow it. All that keeps him from increasing his organization’s work is money. One group of Western tourists heard his presentation, dug through their pockets, handed over a thousand dollars. Less than fifty dollars each, and a large chunk of Josphat’s annual budget.
This is Youth for Conservation’s web site. Look through it: they work on much more than de-snaring.
As I write this 600 readers have visited my site today. A thousand dollars divided by six hundred people is an espresso each, or a fast food burger.
Here is their donation page.
You know what to do.
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
3 comments on "An espresso, or a fast-food burger"I recently got into an argument with a young college student who is writing a thesis (or whatever it is college students write, what do I know about teachifying?!) that asserts that protecting animal populations in Africa is a form of neo-colonialism.
Bleh.
Maybe the restless species would be kinder if we took better care in relating to them. The bushmeat trade inspires resistence in so many, and sadnesses compound. This story about a colleague and mentor of my brother, in the regional Seattle daily.
Dr. Richard K. Root, a gifted clinical teacher at the University of Washington Medical School and former chief of medicine at Harborview Medical Center, moved to Botswana earlier this month to help alleviate Africa’s desperate shortage of doctors and nurses.
Root, a nationally known expert in infectious disease, had gone through some difficult years recently, getting bypass surgery, caring for his wife, Marilyn, until she died in 2001 from a progressive neuromuscular disorder, and struggling with his own depression.
But he recovered, remarried in 2004 and—according to everyone who knew him—was ecstatic at finding a renewed sense of purpose, of life.
On Sunday, while on a wildlife tour of the Limpopo River with his new wife, Rita O’Boyle, Root was killed when a crocodile pulled him from a dugout canoe. He was 68.
He was in a lead canoe with tour guides when the crocodile thrust from the water, grabbed him and pulled him under, said Steve Gluckman, medical director of the Botswana program. He was not seen again.
The tour guides were wary of hippos, but there had been no reports of crocodile attacks in the area, Gluckman said.
“I’d just talked to him on Saturday,” said his son, David Root, a Seattle architect. His father, he said, spoke with great enthusiasm about the work he was doing—training hard-pressed health care workers in the resource-poor hospitals and clinics of Botswana. The African nation has the world’s highest rate of HIV infection, 40 percent of the population.