By Tom Hill
Co-Founder,  Big Life Foundation

In late October of 2008, eight Maasai elders walked down the driveway to my cottage in the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem, unannounced, and made me a proposition.

They said they wanted to “give something back” to the conservation organization that Richard Bonham and I had begun more than ten years prior, the Maasailand Preservation Trust (MPT became Big Life Foundation in 2010). 

“Your Predator Compensation Fund has changed our attitudes toward living with lions,” one elder said, “And we want to do something in return that you could never do.  We want to take lion hunting and lion killing out of our warrior culture, once and for all and make it a taboo. We can do it because we are the menye layiok (cultural fathers and teachers of the next generation of warriors).  But we need your help.”

Another elder then asked, “Don’t boys around the world compete for girlfriends and recognition through sports?”

When I answered yes, the elder replied, “Then why couldn’t our boys do the same?”

And thus, the idea of the Maasai Olympics was born.

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Ten years on, it is a joy to reflect on the results of the Maasai Olympics. The Finals were recently held on December 15^th and was our fourth biennial event. The Maasai Olympis really runs for an entire year leading up to the finals and is comprised of a series of track and field events, combined with a broad-based schedule of educational sessions held to promote the conservation of wildlife and habitat and to help preserve the Maasai way of life.

In the 2018 Maasai Olympics Finals, a strong crowd of local Maasai residents turned up to watch all four warrior teams compete for medals, cash prizes, a golden trophy, and a prize breeding bull.

The Mbirikani warrior team won for the third time in four tries over the Rombo, Kuku, and Eselengei warrior teams.  Throughout the six events – the rungu (a warrior club made of wood thrown for accuracy), the javelin (thrown for distance), the 200, 800, and 5,000-meter running events, and the high jump (Maasai warrior-style from a standing position) – the quality of competition was very high. Going into the final event, the high jump, any three of the four warrior teams could easily have won the overall championship and taken home the prize bull and the golden trophy. 

There were also two events for women, the 100-meter and the 1,500-meter race, and the winners received the same medals and cash prizes as the male warriors.

Mbirikani’s warrior team prevailed once again with 15 points to Rombo coming second with 11.  The competition came down to the very last jumps without knowing who would win.

What is so rewarding to see over the past 10 years is how this collaboration between Big Life Foundation and the regional Maasai community has become an accepted part of Maasai culture here, from within a people who have no previous cultural history with sports.

The Maasai women and girls, almost without exception, come to these events dressed magnificently in their traditional clothes and jewelry, as do many of the warriors, which includes ochre face paint, elaborate jewelry, and traditional hair designs.  It is a truly festive Maasai scene.  And when the warriors jump in the final event, the other warriors in attendance chant, like in all traditional Maasai ceremonies, creating a pulse that is definitive.

When the competitions were completed, Patron of the Maasai Olympics, David Rudisha, the two-time Olympic 800-meter gold medalist, world record holder, and easily the greatest Maasai athlete of all time, placed a medal around the neck of each winner on an Olympics-style winner’s stand as the crowd gathered around closely and applauded.  The local Member of Parliament and the Governor of Kajiado County gave out the team prizes and made speeches reinforcing the conservation message and thanking Big Life Foundation for our work here.

We were blessed this year with a great family of sponsors. The National Geographic Society was a major sponsor --for the third consecutive time, in addition to wonderful supporters Dereck and Beverly Joubert and Great Plains Conservation.  The UK’s Chester Zoo gave their Scholarship Award to the best overall conservation manyatta for the fourth consecutive time.  Two great supporters of Big Life, the Baty family of Seattle and the Tate family of Houston were major sponsors for the second consecutive time.  Two new sponsors with world-recognized histories of protecting lions in the wild joined our Big Life family this year:  Born Free Foundation and Disney Conservation Fund. In addition to Zoo Basel, Safari Professionals of the Americas, and Marleen Groen.

I don’t think things could have gone much better. To everyone who helped make it possible, thank you. We look forward already to the games in 2020.                        

Most of us learn hard lessons when we’re younger. One teenage boy recently learned a very important lesson in Kimana. 

It starts like any coming-of-age story: a young teen had been struggling in Nairobi, so his parents sent him to live with family in the country for a bit of perspective and fresh air. It wasn’t the easiest adjustment, and in his boredom, he noticed a small yellow airplane on an airstrip, left briefly unattended. Curiosity got the best of him. New to the area and not knowing better, he spotted a backpack in the rear seat and plucked it right out, amazed at his luck.

His luck very quickly soured, however. Because it turned out that the plane was Big Life Foundation’s Super Cub, and the bag belonged to Big Life’s Head of Security, who had stopped in for a meeting with Kimana Sanctuary’s community rangers on his way to the office.

When the meeting ended, Craig returned to the plane to find his backpack missing. Annoyed by the delay, but amused by the boldness of whoever had taken the pack, Millar didn’t stress. He simply called in Big Life’s tracker dog unit, who were already nearby for a training activity.

Didi, Bonnie, and Clyde immediately picked up the scent and were eager to get to work. They took turns tracking. First Clyde, then Bonnie, then Didi, then back to Clyde. The teenager had covered nearly 7 km by the time the tracker dogs caught up with him at his home, where he promptly and very sheepishly handed over the backpack.

The dogs got some good exercise and practice for more serious crimes, and the young teenager will think twice about petty theft in the future. 

Thank you for considering a donation in support of our tracker dog program.

Cost vs benefit. It’s an equation that doesn’t sleep, a fundamental driver of every human decision. Those interested in the conservation of the natural world ignore it at their peril. Because conservation is rarely about nature itself, it’s about human behavior.

With an unprecedented level of foreign investment and economic growth across Africa, cost-benefit equations are changing faster than ever before. At national and regional level, certainly, but of greater relevance to conservation outcomes are the daily decisions that each human being makes, almost always to maximise the economic benefit to them. And the impact of these decisions on the natural world is often immense.

We should not be surprised. Throughout history, humans across the planet have exterminated one species after the next, all in pursuit of economic gain. In some cases species were targeted because of the economic losses that they caused, as in the case of the large predators. Other species slipped quietly away as their habitat was turned over to the more economically productive land uses of agriculture and industry.

In a bizarre twist, eyewatering amounts of money are now being spent on recovering some of those species that were pushed to the brink of extinction. But in Africa these species (or their equivalents) still exist. National Parks are critical for their survival, but we are increasingly understanding the limitations of the current protected areas in Africa, both in terms of absolute acreage as well as the various habitats and ecological processes protected by them.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Amboseli ecosystem of southern Kenya, where protected areas cover only a small proportion of the approximately 2-million acre landscape. At least 80% of large mammals leave Amboseli National Park and move onto surrounding community lands at some point in the year. It is these vast spaces between protected areas, and the human owners of that land, that are therefore most important for the ongoing survival of wild animal populations in the region. This is the space in which Big Life Foundation works, with communities and alongside numerous partners in the ecosystem, and supported by USAID.

It’s an ongoing experiment, and it’s not easy. Make no mistake, although lions and elephant look great on an Instagram feed, it’s not much fun living with them. Wild predators kill domestic livestock, often breaking into homesteads at night. Never mind the terror, this costs people money. Elephants eat and trample crops (and tragically, sometimes people too), and can easily destroy a farmer’s entire crop within a few hours, and with it the income necessary to feed their family.

The people suffering these economic losses are not a demographic that can necessarily afford to. This is real economics, real problems. How then can we expect a community to support conservation, when wild animals threaten their daily existence?

It’s an ongoing test. We have to work to reduce the costs, and maximise the benefits. To somehow incentivize decisions that benefit both people and wildlife. And there have been great successes in Amboseli. In these still traditional communities, networks of social reliance are strong, and one job might benefit tens of people. Tourism is an important income generator, and so is conservation. Big Life employs more than 300 people in the ecosystem, making it one of the largest single employers. Most of these staff are wildlife protection rangers, including a unit supported by USAID.

But jobs aren’t enough, conservation professionals need also to turn their attention to supporting industries that are compatible with wildlife conservation. An obvious synergy exists between livestock production and wildlife conservation, and Big Life is working with the African Conservation Centre and Amboseli Ecosystem Trust, supported by USAID and UNDP/GEF to create grazing plans on communally-owned rangelands, and stimulate the recovery of the grazing resources of the ecosystem. Alternative land-uses are knocking on the door, hard, and wildlife dollars will not win this battle alone.

Given that the benefits of conservation might not touch everybody, great attention also needs to be paid to reducing the costs of living with wildlife. When the costs run too high people take matters into their own hands, and cheaply available poisons mean that pests, large or small, can be easily dealt with. Big Life runs a livestock compensation program that reimburses some of the market value to those that lose livestock to wild predators, so long as no predator is killed in retaliation. This program has been phenomenally successful, and has been a key factor in the dramatic recovery and growth of the local lion population, at a time when the opposite trend is being observed across Africa.

Crop-raiding by elephants is an equally important problem, and community rangers spend their nights chasing elephants out of farms. But this is not sustainable, and Big Life is working to install electric fences along the hard edges between agriculture and wilderness, creating a long-term barrier between the competing land uses.

While so many people would agree on the intrinsic value of wild animals and wild spaces, there is no time for these philosophical debates. Because each day, in Africa and across the world, human beings are going about their daily lives, making decisions based on economic cost-benefit equations. If we want to see a world in which nature is valued, we need to create economic benefits associated with conservation. Or at the very least reduce the costs of living alongside wildlife. If we fail to do either, that nasty equation will have its way.

For millennia, humans have fought against nature, trying to beat it back in our attempts to create a comfort zone for humanity. Time and time again we have lost, as evidenced by the ruins of various civilizations across the world, reclaimed by forest, bush, and sand.

Modern agriculture is one frontline of this battle, and with the various chemicals and poisons available ‘we’ are actually starting to emerge on top. But no-one seems to understand that by defeating nature we are defeating ourselves. The pesky insects killed by insecticides are no longer there to pollinate the crops. The soils that we are ‘enhancing’ with synthetic fertilizers are no longer able to sustain the yields they once did.

It’s a common story from farmers across Amboseli: “This soil used to produce lots with little input, but now I get little unless I add a lot (of chemicals)!”

We say, enough. These chemicals are destroying the land, poisoning people, and poisoning animals.

Through the ‘One Heart Farm’ project at Enkijape Primary School, founded by Rhona Mitra and her supporters, Big Life is hoping to inspire children with the knowledge that there is an alternative. Over the course of three years, students have seen this patch of barren soil become a lush garden, and not one synthetic chemical has contributed to this success, the fruits of which are being used in the school kitchen when available.

A farm club exposes children to how natural systems work, and how humans can maintain a sustainable place within them. When you spot more birds and insects within a farm than out, that’s a sure sign that something is going right.

We intend to continue to grow this farm, and the project with it, to create a model that can both supply schools with healthy vegetables, as well as teaching children that you can work with nature, rather than against it.