One of the best gift nature gave to us is the wildlife. Last year, Kenya reported a 90 percent drop in wildlife poaching, but the outbreak of COVID-19 has aroused many difficulties including the country’s national parks that may attract new illegal poachers that are left jobless by the pandemic. The only thing standing in the way of wildlife and poachers despite the risk of disease is a group of eight brave women formed from the Maasai community, known as Team Lioness.
Team Lioness Stopping Poachers
The members of the Team Lioness were given the choice to continue their job full-time and on patrol at Amboseli National Park, a 392-square-kilometer sanctuary that lies at the bottom of Mount Kilimanjaro, with the knowledge that they would have little or no connection with their families during the pandemic. When they are not out patrolling, they reside in their base station doing paperwork.
Though Kenyan officials say there has been no rise in poaching so far, international wildlife agencies are concerned about the influence that closing national parks to visitors as part of attempts to prevent the spread of the virus will have on the well-being of the wildlife.
“In [tourism’s] absence, wildlife security is threatened as conservancies are likely to collapse, leading to loss of space for wildlife,” stated a recent report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
Tourism revenue finances land contracts, community jobs, and livings for many who reside in east Africa’s conservation areas, the report stated.
And the arrivals of tourists around this time of the year are normally at the peak and the accommodation management employs more than 1.2 million Kenyans, said Nancy Githaiga, the head of policy research and innovation at the World Wildlife Fund.
Many of those employees provided security in national parks, including anti-poaching forces and stopping human-wildlife disputes. But they have all been sent home during the outbreak of this novel pandemic, said Githaiga.
The Kenya Wildlife Service and community conservancies relied massively on tourism income to pay the wages of rangers, said James Isiche, East Africa regional director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. But after the state locked down the country in response to the pandemic in March, there was a recorded 98.9 percent drop in tourism income.
Without those funds, the Kenya Wildlife Service and conservancies are no longer in a situation to manage anti-poaching services without the support of subsidies, Isiche, one of the members of Team Lioness said.
The fund that supports the team of rangers watching national parks like the Amboseli, which is home to elephants, rhinoceroses, buffalos, giraffes, gazelles, and numerous other species whose hides and horns are extremely valued by the unlawful wildlife trade.
Besides these problems, Team Lioness has to face some other concerns too. The team members say that the lack of connection with their communities has in some aspects made an already challenging job harder, since community cooperation was a major means by which rangers would collect intelligence on organized poaching activities. Also, they cannot go to their homes to see their families.
Apart from that, their job sponsors other challenges for these brave young women like enduring the blazing heat or flooding while tracking animals. Furthermore, there is an open-ended threat of wildlife attacks that the team has to face without firearms or other equipment to protect themselves.
Despite all the problems in their way, Team Lioness is confident that their work will continue to control the situation to ensure the threats to wildlife do not increase with declining economic circumstances.
