Predators next door
Namibians lived with predators long before colonialists arrived. It's wrong to romanticize a past filled with danger and hardship - lions are hard to live with and always will be – but historically the big cats could move freely, with plentiful wild prey to keep them away from livestock. When hunters depleted these landscapes, the regional lion range contracted to approximately 2,700 square miles in the 1990s. Since then, an almost 400% increase in the lion population has primarily occurred on unfenced communal conservancy land like this.
From 2003 to 2015, lions, hyenas, and other predators were responsible for 5,862 livestock attacks in core lion-range conservancies in Namibia. In this desert landscape, livestock are often the most significant asset—providing livelihoods, milk, meat, and manure and serving as currency or indicators of wealth. The recent prolonged drought forced both livestock farmers and wildlife into areas they would not normally occupy to find food and water and led to a dramatic decline in wildlife and livestock populations in northwest Namibia.
The lionesses and one subadult male seen close to Kamendu's kraal mainly hunt giraffe and are well known in the Anabeb and Omatendeka conservancies. These are two of 86 conservancies in Namibia where local people manage and benefit from the wildlife they live with through jobs, proceeds from tourism, and other sustainable resource use.
After the lions recently killed a donkey near where Kamendu takes his goats to drink, the villagers were understandably worried about further losses when they met with their local Lion Rangers in the shade of a gnarled mopane tree. Lion Rangers are specially trained game guards employed by the conservancy to help prevent conflict between people and lions, and part of the Lion Ranger project. There are roughly three Lion Rangers per 60 square miles.
