Word: livestock
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This is no photo op in a wildlife park for tourists on safari. This is Mugie Ranch, a commercial livestock operation in Kenya's Laikipia district, about six hours north of Nairobi. Some 14,000 sheep and 1,000 cattle graze here on the open grasslands, tended by 200 ranch hands. Barely a mile from the feasting lions, herders are bringing cattle and sheep into their nighttime pens, raising clouds of red dust. The herders whistle at their dogs, which are on the alert for lions--and for leopards, which go to the nearby water hole at night to feed...
...Livestock owners around the world generally kill predators, but the 45,000-acre Mugie Ranch is trying something new. It is part of the Laikipia Predator Project, run by wildlife biologist Laurence Frank of the University of California, Berkeley, who is seeking better ways for big cats and humans to coexist. Adapting techniques from Masai tribesmen, who have herded cattle amid predators in this region for centuries, he is teaching ranchers to build taller, stronger bomas--traditional livestock pens made of thorn branches--to stop night-time raids by lions. When the herds are let out to graze during...
Wild felines don't hesitate to attack livestock and pets, and unless those costs are addressed, people will continue to kill the cats. That's why Mugie's lions must earn their keep. "The great tragedy here is that wildlife has absolutely no value except in national parks," says Frank. "To many Africans, lions are simply pests...
...thrived on. Average life span increased, thanks to the greater abundance of food, but average height diminished. Skeletons also began to show a jump in calcium deficiency, anemia, bad teeth and bacterial infections. Most meat that people ate came from domesticated animals, which have more fat than wild game. Livestock also supplied early pastoralists with milk products, which are full of artery-clogging butterfat. But obesity still wasn't a problem, because even with animals to help, physical exertion was built into just about everyone's life...
...part of the country's 21-year-long civil war between Khartoum and rebels in the south, which is inching toward a peace deal.) In interviews with Time, Sudanese refugees described scenes of Janjaweed fighters dressed in military uniforms marauding through villages on horses and camels, stealing livestock and burning houses. The Arab militias, nomadic cattleherders who have long competed for land with Darfur's black farmers, are backed by Sudanese troops and warplanes...