Lions in the Balance: Man-Eaters, Manes, and Men with Guns

Lions in the Balance: Man-Eaters, Manes, and Men with Guns

by Craig Packer
Lions in the Balance: Man-Eaters, Manes, and Men with Guns

Lions in the Balance: Man-Eaters, Manes, and Men with Guns

by Craig Packer

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Overview

From the author of the memoir Into Africa, “a fast-paced, unsentimental sequel” about the Serengeti lions and the politics of protecting them (Discover).

If you are a morani (warrior), you have your spear at the ready—you could be the hero, but you will have to wait until the morning light before you can go out and prove yourself. If it is a lion, you want to be the first to spear it—and if the lion turns on you, make sure it mauls you on your chest or stomach, on your face, shins, or throat. Any place where you can show your scars with pride, show the incontrovertible evidence of courage. A scar on your back would be a permanent reminder of cowardice, an ineradicable trace of shame.

Monsters take many forms: from man-eating lions to the people who hunt them, from armed robbers to that midnight knock at the door of a cheap hotel room in Dar es Salaam. And celebrated biologist Craig Packer has faced them all. Head on.

With Lions in the Balance, Packer takes us back into the complex, tooth-and-claw world of the African lion, offering revealing insights into both the lives of one of the most iconic and dangerous animals on earth and the very real risks of protecting them. A sequel to his prize-winning Into Africa—which gave many readers their first experience of fieldwork in Africa, of cooperative lions on dusty savannas, and political kidnappings on the shores of Lake Tanganyika—this new diary-based chronicle of cutting-edge research and heartbreaking corruption will both alarm and entertain. Packer’s story offers a look into the future of the lion, one in which the politics of conservation will require survival strategies far more creative and powerful than those practiced anywhere in the world today.

Packer is sure to infuriate millionaires, politicians, aid agencies, and conservationists alike as he minces no words about the problems he encounters. But with a narrative stretching from far flung parts of Africa to the corridors of power in Washington, DC, and marked by Packer’s signature humor and incredible candor, Lions in the Balance is a tale of courage against impossible odds, a masterly blend of science, adventure, and storytelling, and an urgent call to action that will captivate a new generation of readers.

Praise for Lions in the Balance

Lions in the Balance mixes episodes of spy novel intrigue with detailed descriptions of scientific studies and PowerPoint presentations.” —New York Times

“One of the top books of the year. . . . This candid volume is sure to divide opinion, but it is far more than a chronicle of Packer’s campaigns. There are also dozens of surprising facts about the book’s heroes—the lions—and measured commentary on a host of complex issues. . . . The book will make you think.” —Geographical

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226093000
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 12/22/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 355
File size: 10 MB

About the Author

Craig Packer is professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior and director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Into Africa, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He lives in Minneapolis, MN.

Read an Excerpt

Lions in the Balance

Man-Eaters, Manes, and Men with Guns


By Craig Packer

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-09300-0



CHAPTER 1

Fools Rush In

Minneapolis, 6 March 2008

I almost never dream of animals. But when I was awakened by the alarm at half past five this morning, I was still annoyed by that damned lion in the gray-green light, sniffing around outside my tent, trying to come inside. All night, he kept finding a weak spot in the canvas or a loose zipper, and he would come in with me again and again. I had to keep getting up and leading him back out. He wasn't hungry, and I wasn't afraid. He just wanted in, like a huge house cat wanting in to the bedroom.

It was a snowy Minnesota morning. My first thought after fully wakening was, "Keeping lions out of my tent all night long — that's why I'm always so tired in the morning!"

It took a few moments to summon up the courage to leave my warm bed and walk barefoot across the cold floor. Then in the middle of brushing my teeth, standing on the white bathroom tile, the penny finally dropped, and I felt like Freud.

The dream. It meant something.

I've spent decades studying lions, most of my adult life. But for the past few years I've kept the lions on the proverbial back burner.

This morning I was flying off to a conference in Santa Fe where I was supposed to give a talk about lions again — and nosy Simba here had been eager to remind me that I had been neglecting him.

So OK, big guy, you can have my undivided attention for a few days now, but there has been a perfectly good reason for setting you aside. Something I have to do.

Tanzania's population is currently thirty-eight million people — about the same as California — in an area as large as California, Nevada, and Oregon combined. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, despite being the home of the Serengeti, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the spice island of Zanzibar. Maybe as much as 80–90 percent of the population lives in poverty, yet nearly a third of the country has been set aside for natural resource management: national parks, game reserves, and forest reserves. But ask most rural Tanzanians what they think about wildlife, and they'll probably tell you that if they can't eat it, they'd just as soon eradicate it.

Elephants and lions? The two most hated species in the country.

Tanzania has the last great populations of wildlife on the continent. Over a million wildebeest in the Serengeti alone; maybe half the lions left in Africa; one of the largest populations of elephants. Extraordinary biodiversity of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, butterflies, and plants.

Riches beyond compare? Depends on whom you ask. Some people are infatuated with large animals; others live in fear.

And what to make of the Tanzanians themselves? A lot of people just look on rural villagers as pests. An ocean of poverty that consumes bushmeat and converts wild land to cotton fields and subsistence crops. A vast incubator of emerging infectious diseases and a potential source of economic migration, bringing crime and instability to the rest of the world.

It's not that people haven't tried to alleviate the miseries of Africa; Tanzania receives a remarkable amount of aid money from Europe, Japan, and the United States. But you'd be hard-pressed to see much sign of progress.

Much sign, that is, if anyone had been keeping track. I've worked in Tanzania for the past thirty-six years, and while some things have certainly gotten better in many of the larger cities — Dar es Salaam, Arusha, and Mwanza — the rural villages still largely consist of mud huts and makeshift shelters, emaciated cattle, and puny babies. Roads to make an SUV weep, decrepit railway carriages, and sanitary practices blissfully unaware of germ theory and the miracles of modern hygiene.

I remember someone in the 1980s talking about economic growth in the third world, saying that beyond the distinction between developed nations and developing nations, economists were starting to wonder if Africa required a third category: the never-to-be-developed nations, despite unrivaled natural resources and all of the goodwill in the world.

When I first went to Tanzania in 1972, the country had fewer than ten million people. Now there are nearly forty million, and if population growth continues at 3–3.5 percent for the next forty years, there will be 160 million by the year 2048.

And if that happens, you can kiss all the lions goodbye — even the dream lions that sniff around the tent in my bedroom in Minneapolis.


So where to begin? How about with Dennis Ikanda in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area sometime after that trip to Tsavo in 2001 and a few months before 9/11.

Dennis was born in Arusha, a middling city about sixty miles from Mount Kilimanjaro at the foot of Mount Meru on the edge of Maasailand. His parents went to school in Arlington, Texas, when he was twelve years old. They went to study the gospel, and Dennis acquired a wonderful grasp of vernacular English — a skill that made me realize how superficially I had appreciated the intelligence of most Tanzanians. He had worked as a tour-company manager in Arusha after graduating from college, and he had frequently spotted Peyton and another lion assistant, Grant Hopcraft, when they came into town for supplies. He asked them about opportunities and e-mailed me for a job interview.

I hired him to take over from another Tanzanian student, Bernard Kissui, who had just finished his Master's project in the Ngorongoro Crater, and it soon became clear that Dennis should also consider a graduate degree. But I didn't want him to conduct research on a topic that would only be interesting to professional ecologists — with his language skills and ease with people, he should take on a project with a more direct relevance to wildlife management.

Dennis based himself in the drivers' quarters at a posh lodge on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, but he commuted regularly to the Serengeti to discuss lions with Grant and Peyton, and on this particular day he decided to take a shortcut back to the Crater through the Gol Mountains.

He was pretty much in the flat middle of nowhere when he picked up the signal of a radio-collared lion that normally lived near the center of Serengeti National Park, over forty kilometers to the northwest. Approaching the strengthening series of beeps, he spotted a party of six Maasai morani, covered in blood, two of them barely able to walk. They waved frantically at him to stop and told him that they had just speared a lion.

He drove them back to the scene, and there was a dead female with tail and claws removed, her radio collar still around her neck.

The Maasai explained that they had tracked her from over thirty kilometers farther to the east — that she had killed their cattle last night.

Dennis didn't contradict them, knowing that she would have been impossibly far from any livestock depredation, if it had even occurred last night or any other night in the past month. He merely asked how they knew this was the cattle killer, and they told him how they had tracked her to this spot, where she was suddenly accompanied by a dozen other lions. Dennis asked for details, and they eagerly lifted their bloody shins to show where she had lashed out, clawing and biting before losing her life at the end of a half-dozen spears.


* * *

Thus Dennis ended up studying the Maasai in the flyblown villages of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. He had originally hoped to watch lions in the same areas, but they were too elusive and too scarce. So he had to rely on the Maasai's own accounts of livestock losses and close encounters, and he was immediately struck by the consistencies in people's stories. If one village told of a break-in to their boma and a loss of two goats or a lion attack on a morani in the middle of a heavy rainstorm, the neighboring villages knew the same basic details. The bush telegraph worked fast; these were major events in people's lives.

But the Maasai were suspicious of Dennis. He drove a vehicle; he wore khaki; his ancestry was Bantu. Maybe he worked for the NCA authority. Tribalism is not as serious in Tanzania as in, say, Kenya (Luo versus Kikuyu) or Rwanda (Hutu versus Tutsi) or even South Africa (Xhosa versus Zulu), but Dennis was definitely not Maasai, so he couldn't be trusted.

At the beginning, Dennis held a fairly low opinion of the Maasai. He didn't especially empathize with their stubborn reliance on pastoralism ("They don't have to be this poor; they could always sell a few cows"), their vulnerability to predators ("Man, all these kids you see here should be in school. The morani don't have anything better to do; why don't they guard the stock?"), or their squeaky-clean reputation as guardians of wildlife ("Last week they speared a buffalo over there; a few weeks ago, they killed a couple of elands").

For several years, my trips to Tanzania were dominated by excursions into Maasailand with Dennis. One year we went to a high-relief area north of the NCA. We looked over the escarpment of the rift valley, and Dennis said, "Here's where they drive the wildebeest over the cliff. Dozens at a time."

"But they don't eat wildebeest."

"No, they just do it for fun."

"Who? The kids?"

"Kids, yeah, and the morani."

"But I don't believe they just do it for fun. The Maasai have to avoid the wildebeest because of the malignant catarrh — the disease kills their cattle."

"That's true, but they don't have to stick around here when the wildebeest come with their calves."

Malignant catarrhal fever is caused by a herpes virus. It is harmless to wildebeest, but it causes disastrous infections in cattle. Adult wildebeest hardly shed any viral particles, but newborn calves are like malignant- catarrhal-fever factories; any contact between livestock and infant wildebeest (or even their afterbirth) is disastrous. The wildebeest calve in the Crater highlands at the height of the rainy season, grazing on grasses enriched with calcium and phosphorous from the volcanic soils and spilling countless viruses on the fresh green lawns.

The migratory pattern of the wildebeest prevents the Maasai from grazing their cattle on their home turf during the short period of green grass. But "pattern" presumes predictability, and everyone's climate has been in a state of flux over the past decade or two — and when you are poor, very poor, and your livelihood depends on scratching out something from nothing, there is a horrible temptation to gamble away your last chance.

In an average year, the Maasai would have a good idea of the near future: if the clouds build up in November, the wildebeest will arrive by December and pop their babies here at the end of January. So the herders would normally have a month or two to ready themselves for their own migration to the Rift Valley or up near the Kenyan border, keeping their precious cattle as far from the malignant catarrhal fever as possible.

While some parts of the world are becoming hotter or dryer with each passing year, Tanzania's weather is becoming more erratic. Some years the rains fail and the wildebeest never move out this far. Droughts are hard on everybody, and there is no way your starving livestock could survive a long cattle drive, so you stick around and wait for better times.

But sometimes the rains fail in November and December, and the heavens pour forth in January so that the wildebeest arrive before the lawns have turned the slightest bit green.

And if you gambled on a year without wildebeest, you've lost everything to malignant catarrhal fever.

There is no insurance against this sort of thing, no pastoralist pension plan, no savings in the bank. Nothing.

Meanwhile you see these flipping wildebeest everywhere, chomping away on your best pastures, and it is because of the wildebeest that your family can't even live in the Serengeti anymore. The Serengeti National Park was created to provide a refuge for the wildebeest, and the government moved your great-grandparents away from the sweet grasses along the rivers that hold water all year round, forcing you to live in this semidesert with the dusty soil and the grass that never grows more than a centimeter high.

So maybe the Maasai do drive the wildebeest off the cliff just for fun or maybe the reasons are a lot more complicated. But this was only the first year of Dennis's project, and he didn't feel any need to ask.


It is easy to get frustrated with the Maasai, easy to fall into the familiar disdain of the elite for the great unwashed — or even of the semipoor for the ultrapoor. But the Maasai's worldview is so intensely focused that sometimes you just have to laugh.

Grant Hopcraft, part-time Crater lion assistant during the late nineties, employed a Maasai guard on the rim during his weeklong camping trips from the Serengeti. Grant is a low-key, gentle soul. He is the man I most wanted my own son to grow up to be like. Grant thinks before he speaks. He considers the opinions of others, and he cares about people.

After a long day of looking for lions down on the Crater floor, Grant would wind his way up the narrow twisting road to his camp and spend the evening in the company of his Maasai guard, Olokoko. Grant grew up in Kenya, so he is fluent in Swahili, and his relaxed manner made it easy to sustain long complicated conversations about the world at large.

They would talk about things the guard could never imagine, having never left the NCA. He knew about internal combustion engines, of course, and he could see aircraft flying overhead. But he'd never seen an ocean or a train, and one night Grant looked up at the full moon and said, "You know, people have been to the moon."

"You are lying to me. No one can go to the moon."

"No, no, it's true!" And so Grant explained about rockets and space suits.

And Olokoko asked, "How long does it take to get there."

Grant wasn't too sure, but he said, "A couple of days, I guess."

"Now I know you are lying!"

"Why?"

"Everybody knows the moon goes away in the daytime."

"No, no, it's true. Let me show you."

So he went into his tent and came back with a grapefruit and a tomato and gave an impromptu lecture on celestial orbits.

The Maasai listened intently, watching Grant manipulate his fruit in the moonlight.

"OK, so the moon is always there."

"Yes," Grant replied, relieved that his lesson had taken root.

"Let me ask something."

"Go ahead!"

"Are there cows on the moon?

"No, there are no cows on the moon."

"Then why bother to go there?"


I took my kids to the NCA a couple of times during those years. My daughter, Catherine, had never particularly enjoyed Africa or the Serengeti or the animals in the park, but she was transformed by her experience with the Maasai. It wasn't anything that you could easily pin down; she still doesn't especially want to come back to Tanzania. But maybe it was her realization that the red blankets and beads didn't come off when people went home at night. Or that the women and children weren't free to make their own decisions about anything important in their lives. Or that the human condition included almost no limit to its squalor. Whatever happened, she was altered by the experience, and her attention to the Maasai's untarnished humanity turned my own thoughts to new directions that took a few more years to fully sink in.

My son, Jonathan, in contrast, was always in heaven whenever he came to Tanzania. Everything was an adventure, full of snails, pails, and a chance to drive off-road in a stick shift. His viewpoint tended to echo Dennis's initial skepticism, seeing the way that an old Maasai named Pakipuni would always manage to find us no matter where we went and somehow manage to hit me up for a few shillings in some dubious exchange. Jonathan, however, was the only member of the family to try out Pakipuni's barbecued goat that obviously, I tell you, obviously, had been sick with anthrax. And if you get sick, young man, it's going to be your own damned fault; I don't care if you do have a full supply of Cipro ...

But the goat meat didn't sicken my adventurous son, though his lesser illnesses during various trips to Africa ultimately inspired him to aim for medical school rather than a career watching animals.


There came a point, somewhere in the third and final year of Dennis's fieldwork, when he finally earned the trust of the Maasai elders, and they told him things they had been holding back. It was only legal to kill a lion in retaliation for livestock depredation — like in the doubtful case of our collared lion from the Serengeti. But after all this time, the elders decided that Dennis was not a policeman. He obviously didn't work for the NCA; he wasn't a spy.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Lions in the Balance by Craig Packer. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Undertow

1 Fools Rush In

2 Savannas Forever

3 Luke Sidewalker

4 Limbo

5 Milk Stains on White Trousers

6 Fences

7 Fade Out

8 Exile

9 Uptow

10 Object Permanence
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