In South Africa, the rearing of wild animals as a business venture is perfectly normal.
They even have an organisation called Wildlife Ranching South Africa, which is a members' organisation dedicated to advancing the interests of the wildlife ranchers. Among other things, it has an annual 'Wildlife Rancher of the Year' award – something I somehow cannot imagine us having here in Kenya.
And yet the breeding of wild animals for commercial purposes is not illegal in Kenya. I have personally visited a crocodile farm at the Coast, for example. And some years ago, there was a prominent news report of a crocodile that somehow climbed up the steep walls of the enclosure in which such crocodiles were being bred, and escaped into the nearby residential areas, causing total panic among Kenyans, both young and old.
But somehow the South Africans are far better than we are at this business. And this was particularly well illustrated when on World Rhino Day (celebrated on September 22 every year) some interesting statistics came up in the many articles about rhinos published in local as well as global media.
One such statistic was that as recently as the 1950s, there were over 100,000 rhinos in Africa, of which about 20,000 were in Kenya. Admittedly, the validity of those numbers is debatable. And the methods now used to estimate wildlife populations are far more elaborate and sophisticated than anything that existed then.
In any case, even if there were only 10,000 rhinos in Kenya back then, and not 20,000, it would still be alarming that at present there are only about 1,600 rhinos left.
But here is the even more interesting thing: in South Africa, a single rhino farm had about 2,000 rhinos thriving within it. And these rhinos, having mostly been bred in captivity, were all private property.
One South African rancher had more rhinos than all of Kenya’s storied game parks combined.
The secret to this rancher’s success was that he cut off the horns of his rhinos just as soon as they grew, in order to leave no temptation for poachers: one kilogramme of rhino horns is famously believed to be worth more than a kilo of gold in the Far East illegal wildlife trophy markets.
This incredibly high value placed on rhino horns is what has led to the decimation of rhino populations; and it is in response to this that we now have a sweeping global ban on the trade in rhino horns.
And so, ranchers who bred rhinos in order to sell off their scientifically harvested horns, no longer find this business to be sustainable (let alone lucrative) and the ranch with the 2,000 rhinos has been taken over by wildlife conservation stakeholders who now propose to give away the rhinos therein to various countries that would like to have some more rhinos in their game parks.
Kenya is set to be one of the beneficiaries.
This now brings us to the central dilemma of wildlife conservation policy:
It's all very well striving to retain our wildlife populations here in Kenya, as they are the cornerstone of our tourism sector, which accounts for an estimated 1.5 million jobs if we include indirect employment as well as seasonal jobs.
But suppose we had managed to somehow keep our rhino population at that high figure of 20,000 individual rhinos. Given that in the period between the 1950s and now, the human population has risen from about 9 million at Independence to the current 50 million, where really would all those rhinos live?
And rhinos are not to be compared to the many types of antelope which rural-dwelling Kenyans value as “bushmeat”, and hunt relentlessly.
They are more on par with elephants, buffalo and hippos – large beasts that in an encounter with villagers armed only with spears or bows and arrows, are more likely to kill such villagers than to be killed by them.
My point in all this is that balancing human and wildlife populations is no easy task, even where the existence of wild animals within our borders supports a sector which provides a livelihood for very many Kenyans.
