The first Europeans to arrive in Kenya did not need anybody’s licence to kill African game. This was done not only wastefully and whimsically, but without any scientific evaluation of the sustainability of their new-found adventure, writes Peter Maina, in advancing the argument against the re-introduction of big game hunting.

IF things had gone according to the wishes of some “investors”, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) would have been turned into a private company called KWS Ltd and big-game hunting would have been reintroduced. Thankfully, the plug has been blown off by the media, which made the whole plan public thus frustrating it.
There has been a lot of opposition against the plan by the civil society, politicians and even some conservationists.
Kenya allowed sport hunting successfully during the colonial times and 14 years into independence until 1977 when a presidential ban put it on hold until today. Advocates of sport hunting, especially big landowners who want to see the sport resumed, base their argument on this history of success.
However, a cursory look at how sport hunting was managed in the colonial days reveals that it is beyond reasonable doubt that it cannot be used as a model to reopen the sport today. The more we evaluate Kenya’s hunting history, the more reasons we find to keep it banned.
The first Europeans to arrive in Kenya did not need anybody’s licence to kill African game. This was done not only wastefully and whimsically, but without any scientific evaluation of the sustainability of their new-found adventure.
The game department that represented the Queen’s Crown in the colony on issues regarding wildlife stamped the first authority on Kenyan sport hunting. Indeed, the existing law on this pastime is very Anglophone not only in the English language, but besides, you would be forgiven for thinking that part of CAP 376 of the Wildlife Act is meant for hunting wolves and badgers in rural Scotland.
Sport hunting is provided for in a law of parliament, while the 1977 ban is only a presidential decree that may be overturned by a mere stroke of the pen by the incumbent president. As such, while sport hunting is entrenched in the law, the ban is not.
A professional hunter was given a permit by the game department to run a hunting business for clients who would pay for a licence to shoot down a specified species of a specified sex and at a specified place and time. The permit even had a rough age of the animal to be shot and it was upon the professional hunter to ensure that his hunting client followed this to the letter.
If the hunting party accidentally shot a suckling leopard, for example, and the resident warden got wind of it, the professional hunter would be in trouble. Chances were that he would have his licence cancelled.
In a hunting programme, the male species are the most targeted for two reasons. First, they would have the most outstanding characteristics like rhino horns, lion’s mane or the jumbos’ ivory.
Second, by eliminating mature males, the few left behind would breed with multiple females, leaving the population intact. On the contrary, if you shot a pregnant zebra or a leopard breast-feeding four cabs, then you affected the species population by more than one individual animal.
The hunting area was divided into blocks, each with a respective name and number. As a general rule, the less the population of animals in an area, the bigger the block because of the hardship of locating your quarry. This also held true for forested blocks like the Aberdares (block 89) where seeking animals out of the bush was an onerous task. It is noteworthy that most of this wilderness has since been settled on by small-scale farmers trying to practise agriculture that does not work.
Seasonal closures of hunting would be declared in some blocks to allow migration, breeding, recovery from disease epidemics or any other ecological phenomenon that the resident warden thought needed time before resumption of hunting.
In Isiolo area of northern Kenya, for example (which was block No.3) no shooting of the “beautiful” Grevy zebra was allowed when this animal species came to feed on the sprouting grass after the April-July rains. It was not until these zebras returned to the Samburu-Marsabit area in the dry woodlands that the sport hunter would be allowed to go and seek them out.
You were not allowed to shoot an animal from the comfort of your car. If you wanted to kill, you were supposed to be more than 200 metres away from any vehicle, regardless of the risk of attack by the targeted animal. The risk is part of the sport.
Only a gun of a recommended calibre would be used and each animal had its own specification. The lowest calibre with which you could shoot a lion was a .375 rifle, and for an elephant it was nothing less than a .475 gun. This was meant to ensure a humane quick death to the beast and safety for the hunting party.
It is hard, for example, to imagine how you can gun down a 5-tonne elephant with a pistol.
There was always a resident game warden to ensure that these rules were strictly observed. In 1955, Kenya had only eight wardens in the whole country. The Mount Kenya and Aberdare national parks were under one warden, the most famous of them being the late Bill Woodley.
Interestingly his son, Bongo Woodley, is the warden in Mount Kenya, whose administration has since been separated from the Aberdare.
Poaching was hardly a problem, which explains why Kenya could afford to have eight game wardens, and even where it existed, it was a tenuous issue involving local meat consumption rather than the commercially driven wildlife slaughter today.
In North-Eastern province, for example, the warden would receive only one or two cases a year of some Borana herdsmen who had speared a reticulated giraffe. The community who had stayed in this semi- desert area had for hundreds of years relied on the giraffe for skins to make bags with which to fetch water from boreholes. This was tenuous and did not have a negative long-term effect on the population. They therefore could not understand when the white man suddenly showed up to interfere with the natural order of things.
A client was only allowed to shoot the Kenyan wildlife if he was touring the country for a reasonable period of time. This was to avoid hunting tourists who came to seek wildlife trophies from Kenya then went down to Rhodesia (today Zambia and Zimbabwe) or South Africa to spend the rest of their money.
You could not get a licence to shoot a rhino if you were not doing more than 13 days of safari in Kenya.
Prestigious species like lions, elephants, rhinos, leopards and buffaloes cost more than the less glamorous species like the dik dik and the badger.
Baiting was allowed when hunting carnivores, meaning that you could hang a cow’s carcass on a tree to attract the lions. When they gathered, you would emerge from the bush hideout and fire several bullets into the lion’s skull before taking its head with you to Europe to hang in the living room.
During the formative years in the 1940s and 1950s there was less abuse of the venture than in its twilight years in the 1970s.
After the 1966 outbreak of the Shifta war between Kenya and Somalia, there was a heavy influx of both illegal small firearms and bandits (poachers). Unfortunately, this coincided with a steep rise in world ivory market value. Poaching thus grew exponentially like a cancerous tumor, and it was hard to tell ivory from a licensed sport hunter from that of a bandit. From a 137,000-strong elephant herd in 1973, Kenya could not even count 16,000 jumbos in 1989.
Sport hunting is about the prestige involved in killing an animal and hanging its trophy in your library or shoulders. Hunters are least bothered about the meat and leave such food to lesser mortals.
By 1965 there were only 70 professional hunters running the business to invite clients interested in shooting wildlife in any of the three East African countries. Sport hunting was managed regionally by Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania due to a common colonial history under the British. This continued after independence, but only briefly up to the fall of the EAC in 1977.
What has not happened since 1977 is having a client pay so that he can shoot a buffalo or any other wild animal for the fun of it or as a sport in that case. Though sport hunting may seem to offer Kenyan wildlife mangers good returns for their investments, its long-term sustainability is highly questionable. And basing it on the country’s hunting history is completely impractical.