Local communities lead the protection of an endangered antelope
By Tesia Lin
In the 1990s, Kenya’s hirola antelope population “plummeted from 15,000 to an estimated 300-500 animals,” says retired professor Dr. Richard Kock. As chief veterinary officer for the Kenya Wildlife Services at the time, Kock became involved because a virus called Rinderpest was a suspected cause of the antelope’s rapid downturn. The veterinary department was a new feature of the young agency, as was an emphasis on community-based wildlife management. Kenya’s declining wildlife, including hirola, had spurred the reorganization of government conservation agencies and a growing focus on including different stakeholder perspectives in order to better regulate and meet management goals. The changes, within Kenya and broader African conservation communities, were not smooth ones, Kock recalls.
An early test for the new agency came when Elders of the Somali ethnic group sought the agency’s aid in their stewardship of the hirola antelope. “They were saying, ‘We really like this animal, and we don’t want it to get taken away.’ They felt that they had a right, in a sense, to decisions made with this animal, as it was sort of sacred,” recalls Kock. But the team didn’t at first listen to their suggestions, reasoning that state authorities had rights over the antelope, not local people. “Being sort of arrogant conservationists, we thought, ‘Well that’s a nice idea, but we’re thinking something else instead,” says Kock. Suspicious of the motives of local people, the team instigated relocation of a substantial number of hirola to Tsavo National Park to reinforce a small, previously translocated population. Without seeking further advice from the Elders, this created tension.
While places like Kenya are scientific meccas for foreign researchers hoping to work with “exotic” wildlife, people trained in other parts of the world are no match for the wisdom that local and Indigenous communities provide when it comes to cultivating or stewarding the land and its resources. Because these communities have persisted for centuries among eastern African wildlife, their understanding of the balance between people, wildlife, and the land is both deeper and more expansive.
Thus, when the Somali Elders requested assistance with a fenced-in sanctuary that would protect the hirola from predators, Kock recounts the idea as contrary to (what was then) best practice. “Their requests went against some [Western] principles of conservation,” he says. Fences cut animals off from the rest of their habitat, creating barriers to migration routes and reducing access to water and other resources. This can be particularly problematic in arid ecosystems like those in eastern Kenya, where water and good forage are already scarce.
But the team didn’t have many more promising options. Captive breeding had been fruitless and expensive in other countries and was considered unsuitable for this shy antelope. National parks and reserves had worked for other large mammals, including predators, but that success made them unlikely to support hirola. The sandy-colored antelope are highly visible in today’s grasslands, herd in small numbers, and leave their young relatively unprotected, all making them easy prey. Putting them in parks where predators were thriving could hurt the hirola numbers or stall population growth. Expanding national parks to encompass the hirola would also displace local people, whereas moving the hirola to existing parks isolated them from a beneficial environment alongside deeply invested protectors—the Somali community.
The Somali people have lived alongside hirola “since time immemorial.” The antelope, which Kock calls “living relics,” are thought to have existed in Kenya for almost 7 million years. As recently as the Pleistocene (which ended around 12,000 years ago), populations roamed from the Horn of Africa to the continent’s southern tip. However, as the climate changed, so did the vegetation. Open, desert-like land that previously sustained the hirola dwindled and fragmented, pushing them closer to pastoral communities, where the antelope found benefit in cohabitating with cattle. Cattle sites were better fertilized, resulting in more grass for consumption, and humans were protecting their livestock from predators, which increased hirola survival rates too.
Rather than see this as a conflict, Indigenous communities observed connections between the hirola, livestock performance, and land fertility. Only nourished land was capable of sustaining both hirola and cattle, and the presence of hirola suggested healthy cattle, since the two are vulnerable to droughts and the same diseases. The hirola presented no harm to cattle and instead became tied to cattle well-being. “They became a symbol of good things, achieving a sacred value among the people,” says Kock.
As Kock and his team learned more about the depth of this relationship, they also realized the infeasibility of Western conservation ideologies. Echoing a need for change during this same time period, the hirola was re-classified into its own genus, Beatragus, prompting the International Union for Conservation of Nature to elevate the species to critically endangered. This re-classification not only generated more interest and resources for conservation efforts, but it built momentum for the team to re-evaluate their approaches to restoring hirola populations. They began to accept that the Somali Elders—strong and committed in their efforts to save the hirola—had knowledge integral for maintaining hirola populations and that overlooking their advice would be data missing in the conservation effort. Kock says, “We didn’t have to work with the people, but it was the sensible thing to do to manage the species, so we eventually felt it was important to more concretely give them our support.”
As the millennium turned, a new community-based organization, the Northern Rangelands Trust, was set up out of the Lewa Conservancy (which Kock directed at the time). Partially motivated by the tension and misunderstandings surrounding previous hirola translocations, this innovative trust developed to address the growing need for involvement of local and Indigenous communities with wildlife related issues on a local level. Unlike government-owned national parks and reserves, trusts and conservancies tend to be smaller community programs that actively incorporate local people into stewardship. The trust worked with the Somali ethnic community to fulfill the Elders’ suggestions for a fenced refuge, and in 2004 laid the framework that became the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy. This conservancy is owned and managed by local, Indigenous people and is focused on empowering the pastoralist communities. Given the opportunity to sustainably manage both their rangelands and hirola populations, the conservancy has since begun to see the recovery of the antelope.
“Problems at home need a home-grown solution,” says Dr. Abdullahi Ali. Ali is an Indigenous Kenyan, founder of the Hirola Conservation Program, and a University of Wyoming alumnus. He has always shared his home of Garissa—a small town situated by the Tana River in eastern Kenya that calls itself “Home of the Hirola”—with the antelope. Its enduring presence throughout his life inspired him to pursue a conservation career that puts his Indigenous knowledge first.
Growing up in the midst of Kenya’s changing conservation policies, he often noticed how scientists external to Indigenous communities would come in and misunderstand the situation at hand. For example, he says the enthusiasm for African predators caused scientists to seek out proof that predators were responsible for declining hirola populations. This excluded other factors contributing to hirola decline, such as habitat degradation, and it would have highlighted predator control as a solution. But predator control is resource intensive and, because “Africa has a multi-predator system that is key to ecosystem health,” Ali says, it could upset the delicate balance of natural and human communities.
For Ali, protecting the hirola is about maintaining that balance through grassland restoration, a more approachable method backed by his research. Ali’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Wyoming focused on the impact of habitat degradation on hirola antelope. He found that habitat change in eastern Africa from open grasslands to forested woodlands had been accelerated by the loss of elephants that no longer removed a lot of the woody trees. He believed that this could be remedied in a way that benefitted both local communities and ecosystems. Since “almost 70% of wildlife in Kenya thrives and coexists on community land,” he says, restoring grasslands to support the hirola also helps sustain people’s livelihoods.
Now, Ali’s Hirola Conservation Program endows eastern Kenyan communities with resources to conserve hirola, and inadvertently livestock, at a local level. The program employs people to essentially replace the work of elephants by thinning trees and planting native grasses. These same people then harvest the grass seeds and sell them back to the program. Farmers also receive suggestions on how to selectively graze their livestock on these grasses to ensure sustainability, and communities learn to help monitor hirola populations.
Given that the people have strong intrinsic cultural attachments to the land and wildlife that provides for them, many communities have established their own small conservancies, blending centuries of inherited knowledge and observation with modern needs for conserving wildlife. These smaller, more localized conservancies are a powerful tool for conservation and community development, Ali says. “Conserving in our own land improves the living standards of our communities, and helps minimize competition and conflicts.”
If given space and inclusive voices, both Ali and Kock believe that ecosystems can recover—and thus, people can recover. Ali believes, “When you empower the communities, you can feel a larger impact of conservation,” not only for the animals, but for the people. Despite the earlier involvement of many stakeholders in hirola conservation, it was the integration of foreign ideologies and science with locally-led approaches that drove the development of solutions that ensured both hirola and human well-being. Ali believes that “there is a lot of conversation globally about putting conservation in local hands; we should add to that momentum. We all want to save the animals and the planet.”
Tesia Lin is an ex-wildlife biologist and current biological systems researcher. She is passionate about learning from communities whose lifestyles and cultures are historically intertwined with their land, and is grateful she has the opportunity to share their stores.
Header image: These sandy-colored, desert-adapted antelope are highly visible in todays grasslands, making them more vulnerable to predators. (Hirola Conservation Program)
