[ Home ] [ Projects ] [ Photographs ] [ Admin ] [ Press and events ] [ Search ]

Wild cats and dogs of Africa
A lecture given by Tony Fitzjohn at the Natural History Museum 10th April 2002

Thanks for coming here tonight. Thanks to Neil Chalmers for making me welcome again and all his staff for the help they have given to this exhibition.

I feel a bit of a fraud. Standing up here and rattling on about my ideas and feelings in the year 2002 on a bit of a self, and friends, promotional campaign whilst most of Charles Darwin’s collection lies languishing in the vaults below us. What if we’ve missed something really important downstairs ?

But we can only talk about our lives, our knowledge and experiences. So the unknown will have to wait a little longer.

When Olly and Suzi first came to our camp in Mkomazi in Tanzania, at the beginning of their Up Front and Personal Wildlife Art Roadshow I was a little perturbed. Was this not really rather intrusive? Couldn’t they just do the same without disturbing all these wild animals? What ever happened to cameras and long lenses?

And then I realized that all they were doing was a bit like what I have spent a lifetime doing.

Our fascination with the world of Predators goes back further than any of us can imagine. The feelings they stir in us are multi faceted and surprising in their revelations of respect and times long past. Part of our Roots before we started taking ourselves too seriously as a species. And a sense of awe that we could ever have been so close to something like that.

But if I am here tonight to talk about the Predators I have known then what we need is to think more deeply about them and the bigger picture of the world they live in before we start to get too anthropomorphic and isolate our colleagues in the ivory towers of academia.

… I can’t put it any better than George Schaller, the worlds foremost behavioural scientist, so I won’t try .

Without Predators, prey would have no need to run at 40 miles an hour, it would not require a sense of smell powerful enough to detect danger at several hundred feet or bulging eyes for wide angle vision and it would not always have to remain alert, seldom sleeping for more than a few minutes`. The zig zag run of a gazelle, the bounding leaps of an Impala, the bunching up of zebra, the impressive horns of the oryx are all traits that make it difficult for predators to select and pursue an individual.

At the top of the terrestrial food chain are the big cats of Africa - beautiful and terrifying, perfectly evolved hunting and killing machines. Sharing the pinnacle of the pyramid of numbers are some 27 species of mammalian predators, from civets and serval cats down to mongooses and shrews.

There is an abundance of predator species quite simply because there are so many herbivore species for them to prey on. There are large predators because there are large herbivores that provide the opportunity for the former to exist. An interesting dynamic is that occasionally carnivores do keep a herbivore population in check; more often it is the herbivores controlling the carnivore’s numbers. And of course Man. Pity something can’t take out all the domestic stock in Africa - the main cause of desertification, conflict with predators, poverty and strife in so many countries throughout the world.

Man has had a slightly different evolutionary development to the other predators. He has followed a path of learning rather than depending on the slow process of genetic change. With his self-awareness and a sense of a future, he began to shape his destiny and fulfill his dreams, placing himself outside the natural community and becoming a conqueror. In time he became the Lion King.

My life, for the past 30 years, has been one of sharing the lives of lions, leopards and Wild Dogs and doing something about the ever diminishing habitats they live in. We also have an elephant and eight black rhino but they haven’t become predators - yet.

We normally start off acting as surrogate mothers to orphans, seeing them through school and teenage years until they become at one with the wild and their own kind and move off to lead their adult lives, hazardous as they are.

But I’ve jumped the gun a bit here. How did all this come about? Why does Africa allow me to do this /

Driven by a sense of adventure, a love of the wild and 4 years working and travelling in Africa, I joined George Adamson, of Born Free fame at his remote camp in Kora in 1971.

But what was Kora. Kora was 500 square miles of thorn bush in the no mans land between central Kenya and Somalia. It was a place where men lived in cages and lions and leopards went free. Kora was a dream actually. It was an act of the imagination. The creation of the will of one man who loved animals and wanted them to live free.

George Adamson, at 83,died a soldier, fighting for what he believed in. He died at the hands of cowards who needed 3 machine guns to shoot an old man down. What were they so afraid of? Perhaps it was what George represented. A resolute spirit prepared to die for what he believed in.

For 18 years before that we had lived together but what were we doing, what was the purpose of it all?

George Adamson was one of the original Kenya Game Wardens. His territory was the vast Northern Frontier District. His safaris away from his base in Isiolo took him away for months at a time. Always on foot initially with pack mules and sometimes camels, it was some time before he graduated to the first motorcars. He got to know the country, the people and the animals like no one else and the more he got to know the less he liked to shoot, for whatever reason. Seconded to the British Army in the Second World War he served mainly in Ethiopia before returning to his job as a Game Warden in Kenya where he was forced to wipe out wildlife on ranches as they were “interfering with the war effort.”

After the war, George met a talented Austrian artist . While on safari with him she recorded some of the last tribal portraits of the great warrior chiefs and many others in the NFD, one of the harshest places on earth. She became known to the world as Joy Adamson.

Towards the end of his time in the Game Department George was called out to shoot a man-eating lion, one of the more unsavory aspects of his job. The lion turned out to be a lioness with three young cubs. He took the cubs back home with him. The Government allowed George to keep Elsa, the runt of the litter, and the stories of his returning her to the wild were written by his wife and history was made.

After Elsa’s death George released her cubs into the Serengeti. He retired from the Game Department and followed up Elsa’s cubs for 18 months. By this time the story of Elsa had captured the imagination of Hollywood and Born Free, the movie, went into production. It was to change George’s life. Initially acting as advisor they used his extraordinary relationship with lions to turn the film into a unique record of man’s relationship with predators. George then vowed to spend the rest of his life with lions. And he did.

I joined George in 1971 when he was virtually forgotten and alone in Kora. With few tracks and no help, wild lions, crocodiles, old snares and goodness knows what else had taken their toll on his pride of 11 and he was now down to 3. George’s old injured pal, a lion called Boy, had killed a man and George had had to shoot him. It devastated him.

I arrived with little experience of Africa. I had been a truck driver, an outward-bound instructor, a diver, a parachutist and a milkman. I’d doubled as a bus driver and a bouncer, moving through countries like a storm, a drifter with a dream that Tarzan got it right.

For the first ten years together we had very few visitors. Months would go by without talking to another white man. I loved it. But what was extraordinary was that, in this remote place, with no publicity, how people from all walks of life would find George, fascinated by what he was doing and then became completely captivated once they saw it all.

After a few months I asked him to autograph a copy of his handwritten autobiography “ Bwana Game”. He wrote “ A lions welcome to Tony Fitzjohn, latest of the Pride”. Some of my friends even said I had turned into an animal myself. I couldn’t have felt prouder.

When Richard Harris asked me, at the beginning of the shoot of the movie “To Walk With Lions” how I thought he should play George, I said “Don’t say a word, don’t move a muscle, just be the man, are you that good?” George wouldn’t say much; he would show you; you’d watch this remarkable 70 year old man with his lions and learn and he’d give you plenty of rope to hang yourself with.

We lived simply. Tinned food, occasional catfish from the river, a bit of the lion’s pungent camel meat, no fresh vegetables and our lives dictated by the needs of our charges.

We fed ‘em, we walked ‘em, we stalked ‘em, we taught ‘em – and they taught us. We shared their highs and lows, their days and their nights their fights with wild lions and their finding of mates. Time for them to grow so that their instincts and inherited knowledge could be developed and utilized. And we marvelled that our relationship and their trust, and the understanding between us always stayed the same.

Sometimes the lions left for good. We would lose track of them completely as we were limited by the range of their radio collars (a huge technological leap for us in 1975) and we could only go so far in our ageing Land Rovers, or on foot. But there is one incident I would like to mention, as it was as remarkable a coincidence, as it was a lesson in self-control for me.

It concerns a lion called Fred, who I was very close to and who once had helped to save my life. Eventually he disappeared with another male called Leakey whom he had been friends with since he was a small cub. Three years later I was driving with friends from their camp on the opposite bank of the Tana River about 30 miles upstream. Half way to Meru Park we slowed down to cross a narrow, rocky seasonal river bed and as we paused at the top to take the car out of 4 wheel drive, a lion came out of the bush, walked up to the car, banged his head on the front wing and carried on across the road.

Strange. Just like Leakey the lion, Fred’s pal, used to behave, I thought. No radio collar but a strange feeling came over me. I just knew it was him. Then the distinctive sound of Fred calling in the bush to his friend made me feel really odd. What if I got out of the car and called?

I was sure there would be recognition and a greeting, but then what? Those two males had coped so well all these years without human contact and survived and I knew I would have to forgo any pleasure I might derive from any closer encounter and so we moved on. I still think about that a lot.

All those years ago I felt I should have got out of the car and ended up my days with the lions leaving the world and its’ problems behind me. But I didn’t. I’m only a mere human. Within my body I do carry the terrible power of the lion but also the frailty of the ape. And that just isn’t good enough.

There were many who would merely dismiss our work as anthropomorphic. But our methods were to learn about the animals and their behaviour, to re-establish them in the wild as free and independent creatures. We learnt about them through empathy , contact and a close and intimate understanding of them.

I believe that it is a part of a continuum and that we can live with these animals through this empathy and contact. In this we differ fundamentally from a large raft of scientific thinking that believes isolated and uninvolved observation is the only legitimate form of scientific endeavour and that the habituation of animals is unsafe, unnecessary and clouds the judgment of all the players.

So why was it that the most successful rehabilitations were mainly the animals that had been well treated by humans on whatever level of handling or involvement. Maybe they learnt a lot about us humans as well. We always held them in high regard, as living beings with emotions akin to ours.

Some of the animals we could handle. But others were more difficult than even their own wild kind, having been treated atrociously by humans during capture and in captivity. No hard and fast rules could be drawn up as to who would get on with who, who would adapt quickly to the wild, who would need more time, care and attention, and on several occasions we were monitoring 3 or 4 separate groups as they were slowly sorting out their own lives as we lessened human contact to return other lions, and later leopards, to the wild.

I would talk of them as friends that needed a benevolent guardianship. This in turn led us to an understanding and respect for them that overshadowed mere statistics or ‘ behavioural studies ‘ and brought us close to the cutting edge of what life and survival meant to a predator. And it can be a pretty lonely one. All that stealth, fitness and alertness is vital to feed oneself and watch your back at the same time.

But there was no possessiveness. One should not expect more from an animal than it can give. There is no animal that can entirely understand and therefore cannot fully repay. Such were our orphans and outcasts.

We lived a simple life and it was ideal. Except for the lawlessness and anarchy that prevailed over a lot of our time there. There was the constant worry of shifta bandit attacks and the invasion of the reserve by nomadic Somali tribesmen and their stock numbering in the thousands and the refuge they gave to the armed gangs.

Revolutions and poverty to the North, the Ogaden War, complete breakdown of law and order in Somalia and endemic corruption from badly paid and unsupervised government employees meant that there were cheap automatic weapons to be found and a living to be made. The poaching gangs roamed all over Kenya and Tanzania as their own lands became barren after years of domestic overgrazing and mismanagement. The world demand for ivory, rhino horn, lion claws and teeth, dik dik horn pendants, and general first world living room clutter, endlessly fuelled the slaughter.

Lions, leopards and other predators were poisoned indiscriminately, even with cheap and readily available cattle dips with no emetic in to offset the salty , tempting taste it produced for them. Western companies refused to include it on the grounds of loss of profit.

The Wakamba tribesmen, to the south of Kora, still hunted using bows and arrows with poison made from the boiled up bark of the acocanthera tree but their impact had lessened considerably due to competition from the aggressive and well armed Somalis who were just as ruthless when raiding a village or ambushing commercial or government vehicles, as they were at slaughtering the rhinos and then the elephant. Respect for life just wasn’t a factor for them.

Melting back into the bush again was second nature to them and for years the Kenya security forces were hard pressed to find much success in country which the Somalis regarded as their own.

But, apart from these human threats, is it inherently dangerous? Of course it is! I am one of the few human beings in this world who has survived a full lion attack so it is worth talking about. But how and why did it happen?

One evening after I returned from a supply trip to Garissa, George asked me if I could try and bring the four young lions in for the night as he had tried and failed. They were just outside camp. Whilst greeting them before the gates were opened for me to drive in, Arusha, a young lioness, was killing a guinea fowl, so there was lots of growling and the other three were keeping their distance.

One moment I was squatting on the ground next to Fred, a young male. The next moment I was upside down with what I realized was a much bigger lion strangling me by the throat. This was after several attacks to the head, legs and body and a huge chunk of flesh was ripped off my shoulder and neck.

I remember Fred going for the bigger lion more than once, clawing him in the hindquarters to distract him from me, trying to give me a chance to get up and get away. But to no avail. I was bemused and almost deaf -a silent spectator at my own death. A strange sense of disembodiment took over and I passed out.

George was alerted by one of the staff but he simply assumed it was all fun and games. He wandered over with a stick just as the lion was dragging me away to finish me off. George went for the lion, and this act of bravery was enough bluff to see the lion off and George helped me back to camp.

The Flying Doctors couldn’t make it until 10 o’ clock the next morning, but somehow I survived – to be thrown out of hospital 13 days later for rowdy behaviour.

24 hours after the attack, a wild lion called Shyman, who we had assisted in the wild after the disappearance of his mother, came back to camp and started attacking the young lions. My blood was still all over his muzzle, chest and paws and he looked very odd. After much thought and after he had shown himself keen to kill the younger lions, George was forced to shoot him.

Only much later we realised he might have been poisoned, as the Somalis were wiping out the rhinos at the time and many of the carcasses were poisoned.

But we didn’t just work with lions.

Any woman who has ever owned or worn a leopard skin coat should be put in a small box with one of the survivors. Decimated for their lovely hide I have always felt that they have never recovered in anything approaching their original numbers, anywhere.

Overlapping ranges , an immensely varied diet from birds ,lizards and hyrax to small gazelle and young buffalo, an ability to climb the smallest branches of the highest tree , theirs is the life of the proverbial cat out on a limb. Solitary and self contained , adaptable, canny and fearless, their life depends on not making the smallest mistake and viewing the world from on high . A perspective that induces horizons of thought and an almost philosophical detachment from the humdrum.

Their secretive and nocturnal activities have not been studied in any great depth and their reputation as a ghostly , nocturnal wraith moving with equal ease in the harshest bush or urban situations , virtually undetected , has not helped their reputations in the minds of orderly , inquisitive humans.

Our first two leopards came from a bar in France . A male and female , they were extremely attached to each other . When small they hid during the day and played at night venturing forth only in the evening when it was time for supper. Later on, tree climbing was an important part of their lives . A deceptive indifference to human contact was mixed with a demand for full attention when they decided they wanted it – or when play got rough. Compared to the lions it was more like a marriage than going out with the cast of “Friends” .

I had to build a separate camp for them 8 miles from George’s camp and the programme was run on identical lines to the lion programme –and it worked. They were fully released at 14 months and were hunting for themselves soon afterwards. They kept out of the way of lions – there were lots of trees to climb – but huge troops of baboon proved a very real threat until I was able to chase them away.

Two more leopards were brought in from Paris and 6 more from Kenya- mostly mature stock raiders from up country; one was an urban leopard that had been caught drinking water out of a bath in one of the new Nairobi housing estates.

They all returned successfully to the wild and although sightings were limited, their movements could be followed for nearly two years on improved radio collars. My original female, Komonyu, stayed with me in camp, which I eventually had to fence, as she wouldn’t tolerate my other girlfriends.

The lion programme had been officially closed down before I started the leopard camp and then the time came when, for political reasons, the leopard programme was subject to the same restrictions. But by this time an extraordinary event had taken place.

Komonyu would break into camp to play with a small abandoned lion cub we had rescued.

We called him Lucifer and he and Komonyu would play for hours together around camp and then in the bush and as he got too big for her to handle (i.e. she was losing all the fights) they would still go off together with the leopard, spending the day up a tree and the lion resting down below.

What language they spoke, I have no idea, but communication there certainly was and neither at any time hurt the other. It was the stuff of fables and from being the initial umpire I became a very privileged part of this unusual relationship.

Leopards are still being heard in Kora, so the KWS tell me, but there is room for plenty more. Maybe one day…

All good things come to an end and Kora was no exception. I won’t go into the details, but I had to leave what had been more than home for 18 years. But more than anything it meant I had to leave George. Terence, George’s brother, had died two years previously and George was now on his own. Less than a year later George was murdered near his camp and I still live with that. But circumstances at that time forced me out and I had to look elsewhere to carry on what George and I stood for.

After 30 plus lions and then 10 leopards and pioneering the development and gazettement of Kora as a Game Reserve, soon to be a National Park, I was on my way again.

We had stood against the shifta gangs and the movement of the Somalis with their stock across the Tana River into Kora, much of it on our own, and shared both good and bad times with the local people and concerned government personnel that were sometimes able to help. The battle was not over, but my part in it was, and I had no idea where I was going.

After several months of surveys both by air and road, desperate fund raising trips to the USA and England and at the welcome of the Tanzanian Government, I kick started my life again in a place called Mkomazi.

This is a talk about predators I have known so you don’t really want to hear about the initial 5 year slog re-establishing infrastructure into an area that had, only 15 years previously been the home of 4000 elephants and 500 Rhino amongst much, much more. 11 elephant remained, the rhino had been wiped out, along with most of the other wildlife and thousands of head of Cattle and almost non-stop fires had done the rest. The Government almost let it go.

Roads, Anti Poaching and anti stock patrols had to be established. So did the setting up of a permanent base camp. It was all back to square one but I had the great opportunity of reinventing myself as a Wildlife Manager. I was also a pilot by this time and had my own small aircraft. No more them and us. I was one of them. Radio systems, water sources, and dams. Uniforms, bonuses and a 50-man workforce. Workshop, a JCB, a grader, vehicles, water tanker. The building of a secondary school in the local village, help with Polio campaigns and a start in the changing of attitudes on both sides. And now the establishment of a Tourism Circuit. And that’s just part of it. The list, and the work, was endless, and still is…

Then I was asked to build and stock Tanzania’s first Rhino sanctuary in Mkomazi. But besides this there was one predator I really wanted to understand and help and that was the African Hunting Dog. So totally different from lions and leopards, they are probably the most endangered carnivores in Africa after the Simian Jackal and little was being done for their long-term survival. Brian Jackman wrote eloquently on them in his book “The Marsh Lions”.

“ Wild Dogs are the wolves of Africa. Their heads are broad, their muzzles short. When they yawn, their jaws reveal a formidable array of teeth whose jagged edges have evolved to shear through flesh and sinew. There is strength in the muscular neck, stamina in the deep chest, tenacity and endurance in their long slim legs. They are not built like the cheetah to produce blistering sprints. Rather, they are the coursers who seldom raise their hunting pace above 30 miles an hour, but can maintain a steady speed for miles, wearing down their prey in a remorseless and single minded chase to the death. They have a way of running that is beautiful to watch in its effortless economy of movement; lean and easy, but also chilling in its unremitting momentum. The African plains and woodlands are the home of many killers’ lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas, martial eagles; but the Dogs are the deadliest of them all. “

At the beginning of the last century people estimated there were up to 200,000 Wild Dogs but today they are a vanishing species. For years they were despised as vermin, shot and poisoned by farmers, hunters and game departments alike. All over Africa their history has been one of unremitting persecution. Condemned as stock raiders, blamed for the decimation and dispersal of the wild herds, loathed for the way they disembowelled their living prey, they became a fugitive breed, to be eliminated wherever they were found.

Old prejudices die hard; but as more enlightened attitudes began to prevail, the wild dog appeared for the first time in its true light as a highly intelligent social animal whose hunting efficiency actually improved the quality of the plains game by removing sick individuals and scattering herds to prevent inbreeding.

Sadly the change may have come too late to save the dogs as they continue to decline throughout their range, mainly from disease contracted from domestic animals. They have also been the subject of much debate and ill conceived and sadly too late vaccination programmes.

After searching a vast area in Tanzania – the range of the Northern Wild Dogs- we found an area on the Maasai Steppe – 60 miles from our camp – where the Dogs had returned after an absence of several years and were living in conflict with humans.

A Maasai Elder and Government Official had written to us saying that these Dogs were killing Maasai goats and sheep and would be poisoned if I didn’t get there soon.

We checked out the sites with Giles Thornton who was in charge of the field work and then left him with our staff and the Maasai leaders to work out the best strategy for removing the pups.

We had decided not to dart the adults – a messy, haphazard business with limited success and maximum damage and distress to the animals – but rather to raid the dens when the adults were out hunting, digging down into the ant bear holes where the pups were hidden. I had no desire to deprive the adults, who were beginning to do so well, of their freedom and also hoped that, if we removed the pups after an initial period of concern, the dogs would move off and mate again hopefully solving the human/animal conflict problem.

3 separate removals took place over 7 days to give us a total of 25 pups. They were about a month old and had received their fair share of immunity from most diseases from their mother’s milk.

As hoped, all the groups after spending 24 hours searching for their pups moved off to more remote areas on the Steppe, well away from people, and one group at least was seen mating again.

We kept them on the Steppe for a month and then brought them into camp in a friends aircraft. The seasoned and highly experienced Tanzanian pilot got a great kick out of declaring to Kilimanjaro tower that he had 27 souls on board a 12 seat aircraft.

It was initially going to have to be a captive breeding and veterinary programme. Numbers had to be built up and resistance to disease studied.

At first we kept them all together once computer chips, for identification, had been inserted beneath the skin of their left shoulders. A vaccination campaign was undertaken headed by Aart Visee who I had known when he was the vet at the Rotterdam Zoo. 4 compounds were built and the dogs separated and DNA’d to prevent inbreeding. The vaccination programme broke new ground, specifically on the efficacy of immunity to rabies being developed with a course of three injections. We used only killed vaccines, including a newly developed vaccine for canine distemper.

Successful breeding had never taken place before in East Africa but we had great staff, and we were lucky. Soon , numbers were in the 50’s and we were able to send 4 males to the Kenya Wildlife Services where they were released with 4 wild caught females in a reintroduction programme, which was a partial success.

Tanzania National Parks and the Tanzanian Wildlife Research Institute committed to a reintroduction programme for our wild dogs into the Serengeti National Park, where the dogs had previously been numerous but since disappeared after a dubious vaccination programme. To this day there are still questions as to exactly what went wrong, and a massive wave of paperwork pointing every which way.

We prepared a reintroduction paper, and selected animals for reintroduction. Then disaster struck. A vicious strain of canine distemper swept through each breeding compound taking out 49 dogs. We were devastated and shocked. How had this happened? We had inoculated the dogs with a canine distemper killed vaccine, and had been advised that they had sufficient immunity.

Tragedy and heartache often stalk success in the wildlife world. And thankfully, from the ashes has arisen new hope. The virology and immunology units in the University of Rotterdam are now taking this programme very seriously, looking into the wild dogs overall immunity systems for the first time, and preparing new vaccination programmes to combat the serious threat of canine distemper.

And then suddenly two wild females turned up and stayed at the compounds of the remaining dogs for 5 months, until one was encouraged to come in and her shyer sister was darted and enjoined into the programme. The dogs have bred again, and the alpha female is now pregnant. The subordinate male and female are also mating and we have a new start of pups, two breeding groups and the potential for two more breeding groups. The numbers game is critical and although we have the potential to bring numbers up relatively quickly, each dog is critically important.

The reintroduction will go ahead in 18 months time and we will continue doing our utmost to get packs of wild dogs back onto the Serengeti plains and breed up a viable population for continual reintroduction and recolonisation elsewhere. Eventually, they will have to cope on their own. So it’s a numbers game as well. But endangered species programmes have now taken on a serious turn.

It’s not just frivolous talk and fundraising and sad pictures. Now it’s down to everybody. It’s the gamekeepers, it’s the vets, it’s the positive political will of host Governments, it’s the pure researchers in labs thousands of miles away. It’s the drug companies whose initial reluctance to help has to be turned into one of co-operation. It’s anyone with half a brain who doesn’t ask the question , why should we bother ? And in the end it’s probably up to you guys out there tonight. We are not going to lose another species, just because we haven’t tried hard enough. No excuses, No blaming governments or lack of funding. Just Get On With It.

We have conquered the wilderness but it has been a hollow victory. In a few brief years our knowledge, understanding and perceptions have changed. It just remains for us to effect the changes that our world, our Kingdom of Predators, needs so badly for the survival of us all.

Yet no observer coming to Mkomazi, can fail to notice the startling difference over the past few years. In Kora it took us 20 years to put less than 200 miles of tracks in. Within a few brief years in Mkomazi we had 500 miles of roads and boundaries cleared and that increases annually. In Kora we cleared and dug by hand. In Mkomazi we now have all the machinery to run a modern Wildlife operation. It is all second hand, passed on kit that we somehow keep going with the generosity of many supporters and a full time workshop to maintain it. The Boy’s got his toys but there’s nothing flash about it. The good thing is we can achieve so much more at great speed than we ever dreamt of in Kora. And we’re always begging for more.

In Kora, weekly trips to the village to collect a camel and information, are now replaced in Mkomazi by contact with 41 villages, the building of a secondary school, and help to many others. With a permanent 45 man staff we are the biggest employer for miles around .

In Kora, we were hard pressed to get help when the animals were sick or injured, In Mkomazi we have access to the worlds top wildlife veterinarians, whom we know will be on site within 24 hours and give us solid advice in the meantime. I could go on but the differences are enormous, for that is what has to be done and to date it has been an enormous success.

We are a tiny wildlife charity …so if we can do it …..

But the principles are exactly the same. For all the technology there is no substitute for contact with the animals, for foot patrols, and for a hands on approach where people DO things because they care, rather than just talking about them in endless seminars or writing about them in yet another scientific ‘paper’.

We have signed a groundbreaking ten year pact with the Tanzanian government in Tanzania and are constantly aware of the changing politics and policies that appear and disappear with mercurial frequency.

As the Predator at the top of the food chain, that is what we must do. And much, much, more. And none of it would have been possible for me without the love, wisdom and caring that George Adamson showed me in Kora.

 

Top
Send mail to anthony@marrian.com with comments or questions about this site
Copyright  © 2007 George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust