Kilimanjaro Lion Conservation Project

Category: General | Date: Jul 11 2008 | By: Seamus

I had a look at the readers’ comments on Ndelie’s tracking site on the Lion Guardian blog and thought maybe a response would be appropriate.

Quite a few people that I speak to seem concerned about the potential for would-be lion killers to abuse this location information. Timi says:

Sounds like a two-edged sword - someone could use that information to find the lion for killing?

I think these kinds of concerns are generally raised by people who perhaps aren’t familiar with local conditions. These lions are amongst the most reclusive, difficult to work-with lions in the world. Even having a location from a collar, accurate to several hours previous is not going to gauruntee that you will be able to get to that lion. The three obstacles to such a scenario are: 1) The thick difficult-to-access thickets that these lions hide in during the day when they are resting (its exceedingly dangerous to try to go after lions in these thickets, even if you know exactly where they are) 2) The communities around these lions are very rural, close-knit groups. They tend to notice any stranger in the area, good intentions or not. And would generally not allow strangers access to their land, and their wildlife and lastly 3)the Lion Guardians are mostly not all that far from our collared lions.

This is essentially a conflict-resolution project. To resolve conflict one of the first steps is to build trust between the parties. In our case, the lion guardians and I share lion location information with the owners of this land (the Ilkisonko Maasai) as often as we can, not just for Ndelie, but for all the lions. This happens several times per week, depending on who of us is working where and the website is simply an extension of this relationship. There has been great enmity between the Maasai and conservationists in the past and withholding information about their wildlife, on their land would just perpetuate this. Lack of transparency has ripped apart the fabric of kenyan society at so many scales, and I would hope that our work breaks old habits.

By the way, if anyone can find any websites that give close to real-time tracking of wildlife then do give me the links. I looked around while Mike and I were developing Ndelie’s site and I couldn’t find anything that updates in the same way that ours does.

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