The video surfaced online around
October. Filmed from a distance, it shows an antelope grazing on the African
plain. Suddenly, two cheetahs race toward it and the antelope takes off,
running toward the camera. But the cats are too fast. They converge on it and
bring it down. They begin to feed.
اضافة اعلان
Almost at that exact moment, a second drama
unfolds: The
safari vehicles that have been parked in the background begin to
move. One dark-colored 4x4 hits the gas and begins driving closer to the
animals. Then vehicle after vehicle is on the move — green, brown, white, in
various states of repair. You can hear the voices of the guides within yelling
at one another. Some start to honk their horns. The vehicles form a circle,
jockeying for position as their passengers hold up cellphones to record the
cheetahs and their meal.
A woman’s voice can be heard in the
background. “Are they stupid?” she asks.
The video was filmed in the Masai Mara National
Reserve in Kenya, home to many of the Big Five animals (lions, leopards,
elephants, buffalo, and rhinoceroses) that safari participants tick off their
lists. The identity of the video’s creator remains unknown, as does the date it
was shot.
It was originally shared by a Twitter
account using the name
@DrumChronicles and has been viewed more than 175,000
times since it appeared. Guides and conservationists who have seen it said the
video underscored a problem many of them have observed since the Kenyan
government began lifting most pandemic-related travel restrictions: safari
vehicles packed with cellphone-wielding tourists led by guides who are willing
to get too close to the animals.
Overcrowding at popular
safari spots was a
serious issue before the pandemic, but as tourists have returned to Kenya, the
problem has come back with alarming speed and “appears to be heightened by
pent-up travel demand”, said Judy Kepher-Gona, director of the Sustainable
Travel and Tourism Agenda, an organization based in Kenya that has called for
stricter monitoring in the reserve.
“Sadly, what is seen in this video is the
rule and not the exception in Masai Mara reserve,” she said.
The human desire to get close to animals, however dangerous, is innate.
In February, a Toyota Land Cruiser carrying
tourists got so close to a family of cheetahs, the vehicle nearly ran over one
of the cubs.
The problem, which conservationists
describe as “aggressive tourism”, preceded the pandemic, but it appears to have
gotten worse, with guests hungry for Instagram moments and tour companies
trying to make up for the losses they suffered when the world shut down.
“Personally I won’t go into the Mara
Reserve ever again in season because of this,” said Michael Lorentz, a
safari guide based in Cape Town, South Africa, who leads tours in Kenya. “It actually
upsets me so much, and it upsets my guests to see how badly animals are being
treated.”
An urge to get too closeThe human desire to get close to animals,
however dangerous, is innate, said professor Philip Tedeschi, the founder of
the Institute for Human-Animal Connection at the University of Denver, who
frequently visits Kenya with his students.
“It’s part of our DNA to pay special
attention to living systems,” he said.
Last summer, a small boat in Plymouth,
Massachusetts, came so close to a humpback that it almost capsized when the
whale leapt out of the water and landed on its bow.
In May, a 25-year-old woman who approached
a bison in Yellowstone National Park was gored and tossed 10 feet into the air.
She survived, park officials said in a statement that warned visitors to stay
at least 25 yards from the animals.
The behavior may be misguided and
dangerous, Tedeschi said, but it is also an attempt to have a “peak
experience”, a term coined by psychologist Abraham Maslow that describes a
euphoric state of mind that comes from witnessing or participating in a moment
so intense it changes the neurochemistry of the brain.
And it can lead us to put a premium on
being far too close to animals — “literally being able to look over the
shoulder of the animal as it kills its prey” — while forgetting that animals
are sentient beings whose behavior is altered by our presence, he said.
The consequences for animals can be
devastating, Tedeschi said.
In Kenya, cheetahs — the fastest of the big
cats, but also among the most timid — can easily be scared off a hard-won kill
even if they have gone days without eating. Vehicles that get too close can
reveal a cheetah’s position to prey or other predators, adding another
challenge for animals that are struggling to find food because of drought and
habitat loss.
Tourists clamoring for front-row seats are adding pressure on the animals, who could respond by traveling in smaller numbers or deviating from their established routes…
Large numbers of vehicles and tourists in
the roughly 1,500-square-km Masai Mara are also threatening the annual journey
of mammals known as the Great Migration, when more than 1 million wildebeests,
along with zebras and gazelles, move through the reserve in July and August,
the peak travel months for Kenya.
The Great Migration was already being
threatened by other types of human behavior, including urban development, new
settlements, and fencing for farms.
Tourists clamoring for front-row seats are
adding pressure on the animals, who could respond by traveling in smaller
numbers or deviating from their established routes to avoid the crush of
vehicles and tourists, said Benson Gitau, a Kenyan guide.
Searching for a better wayTourism is critical to many
African economies. By 2030, travel to the continent is projected to generate more than
$260 billion annually. In Kenya, before the pandemic, tourism accounted for
nearly 10 percent of the gross domestic product, according to the Ministry of
Tourism and Wildlife.
In 2019, more than 2 million people visited
Kenya, a number that was expected to grow by more than 7 percent in 2020, the
tourism ministry said. But then the pandemic hit, forcing hotels and
restaurants to close and more than 80 percent of companies in the country’s
tourism sector to lay off workers. And those who did not lose their jobs often
had to cope with pay cuts of up to 70 percent, the ministry said.
During the height of the pandemic, many
guides lost their jobs and had to use their vehicles as taxis or to deliver
groceries, said Gitau, the Kenyan guide, who works in the Loisaba Conservancy,
a 57,000-acre wildlife reserve north of Nairobi.
Visitors have returned steadily, although
in smaller numbers. By the spring of 2022, international tourist
arrivals in Africa had more than doubled compared with 2021. In October, Najib Balala, then
Kenya’s tourism secretary, projected 1.4 million to 1.5 million visitors to the
country by the end of 2022, compared with 870,000 in 2021.
But as the country welcomed back visitors,
leaders began rethinking how to manage tourism in its reserves and parks.
In May, Balala’s office released a 130-page
report that called for a “new tourism strategy”. Among its proposals:
increasing prices for the Masai Mara in July and August (it currently costs up
to $80 for nonresident adults to visit the park) and restricting development of
new lodging in the country’s national parks to 30 beds.
There are dozens of camps and lodges in the
reserve and the protected areas that neighbor it, according to Masai Mara
Travel, a tour company in Kenya. Some camps and lodges in the reserve have up
to 200 beds, Gitau said.
But conservationists and guides on the
ground say few, if any, of the measures proposed by the ministry have been
enacted.
The Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, which
came under new leadership in October, did not respond to repeated messages for
comment. The Kenya Wildlife Service, a state corporation charged with managing
and conserving the country’s wildlife, declined to comment.
Tourism offers local communities an incentive to protect wildlife, and with few other industries offering well-paying jobs, many Kenyans depend on tourism as a lifeline out of poverty.
Zebra Plains, one of the tour operators
whose vehicles can be seen in the video, did not respond to requests for
comment. The video was posted in November on Zebra Plains’ Facebook page by a
user complaining about the drivers’ conduct.
“Whilst our photographic guests usually
have
off road permits that does not excuse driving between other vehicles and
the sighting,” the company responded in the comments. “This will be taken up
with the guides concerned.”
With the Masai Mara increasingly under
pressure from tourists, conservationists have been pushing for the “conservancy”
model, in which private parcels of land owned by local communities, such as the
Masai, are leased to tour companies. They agree to hire community members as
guides, camp managers, kitchen staff, and housekeepers and to follow rules that
include caps on the number of lodges and camps and limits on the number of
tourist vehicles. The largest camp in Loisaba Conservancy, for example, fits 20
to 30 tourists, Gitau said.
Since 2013, when the Maasai Mara Wildlife
Conservancies Association was established, about 350,000 acres of wilderness
bordering the Masai Mara reserve have come under this type of private-public
partnership.
Research shows wildlife fares better where
tourism is more controlled. For example, female cheetahs in the Masai Mara
reserve raised far fewer cubs than cheetahs in the conservancies, according to
a 2018 report in the scientific journal Ecology and Evolution.
At the same time, a healthy tourism
industry is critical to conservation efforts in a region of the world with some
of the most endangered species, including black rhinos. Tourism offers local
communities an incentive to protect wildlife, and with few other industries
offering well-paying jobs, many Kenyans depend on tourism as a lifeline out of
poverty.
The goal should be to improve enforcement
and monitoring in the Masai Mara reserve, not to discourage travel, Kepher-Gona
said.
To that end, visitors have tremendous
power, she said. They can make sure tour companies have guides licensed by the
Kenya Professional Safari Guide Association and ask tour companies for their
codes of ethics and if the guides keep their distance from animals to avoid
disturbing them. Gitau said that as a rule, a trained guide will come no closer
than 20 to 30 meters to a hunt. “When you arrive there, you have to switch off
your engine, keep quiet and enjoy the scene,” he said.
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