There is an ongoing wildlife census here in Kenya, which is expected to continue all the way to early 2025.
The results, however – whatever they might be – will not be able to answer this fundamental question: What would be the ideal population of wildlife within the Kenyan borders?
For one of the intractable realities of wildlife conservation is that it always involves a delicate balance between the interests of the wild animals, and those of the human population.
Consider for example, where things stood at Independence in 1963:
The human population at that time was just under nine million people. Which seems laughably low now, but it was actually an improvement on the populations in previous decades when, every now and then, some swiftly spreading airborne infection could wipe out entire villages.
The modern medicine introduced by the colonial government is what made possible the subsequent rapid population growth that eventually led to Kenya now having about 51 million people.
With animals though, the trend is the diametric opposite: at Independence and for a few years thereafter, the population of Kenya’s wildlife was to be counted in tens of thousands, for most of the iconic species (eg elephant, giraffe, buffalo, lions, etc).
If you find this surprising, then bear in mind that there are African countries, with savannah grasslands and various other ecosystems not very different from Kenya’s where such large populations of various animals can still be found.
Botswana, for example, has about 130,000 elephants, compared to our roughly 35,000. And South Africa has about 10,000 lions, while Kenya has about 2,500.
So it should not be very hard to believe that as late as the 1970s, Kenya had over 100,000 elephants, for example, and maybe 20,000 lions.
So what led to this rapid decline in wildlife populations? Just two things really: habitat loss and human-wildlife conflict.
Just try to imagine Kenya, with its current 51 million people also hosting 130,000 elephants. That would involve a quadrupling of the number of elephants to be found in all the game parks and adjacent areas. And the same for lions: there would be four times as many lions in Kenya as there are now.
Such wildlife populations, in our current circumstances, would be unmanageable – and dangerous.
This is not just a theoretical possibility. We have in fact had one such tragedy only narrowly averted, if we are to believe a story I was once told by a contact of mine in the wildlife conservation establishment:
Lake Nakuru National Park is one of Kenya’s relatively few “fenced game parks”. The Aberdares National Park is another. The idea here is that there are some game parks concerning which it is absolutely imperative to keep the animals contained within the park, and to keep people out.
So, the resident buffalo population of the Lake Nakuru National Park, untroubled by the buffaloes’ natural enemies, which are basically the big cats and us humans, thrived and in time increased exponentially. The park simply had too many buffaloes.
This led to a situation in which there was a very real threat of “ecosystem collapse” – the irreversible changes in the make-up of an ecosystem (in this case savannah grassland) which could have led to the park no longer being able to sustain its various animal populations.
The KWS, it was whispered, resolved this thorny problem by “culling” (ie shooting) a good number of these buffalo under cover of darkness, and then secretly transporting the carcases in large trucks to some remote corner of one of the larger game parks for final disposal.
If this had not been done, the result of this very large population of buffalo in the Lake Nakuru National Park would have been much like what has occasionally happened in the Aberdares National Park, where some of the large resident elephant population have been known to somehow break through its celebrated electric fence, and go on a marauding tour of local farmlands.
In short, even with the best of intentions, there is a limit to how many wild animals a given parcel of land, dedicated to the conservation of wildlife, can safely support.
More on this next week.
