The Hunt for the Golden Mole (25 page)

Charles Darwin left us with a question to ponder. Does evolution tend towards increasingly stable ecosystems that bind together every living thing in a Gaian mesh of symbiotic relationships? Or must it lead catastrophically to an all-powerful ‘Genghis Khan species' whose unquenchable greed will exhaust the planet? Flannery inclines optimistically to the former, trusting in the capacity of human genius to take us beyond the ‘civilised imbecility' of the early Anthropocene. There are times and places where it is easier to be carried along by his optimism. One of these is Ol Pejeta, where, somewhat over-fortified by a good supper and a generous quantity of South African red wine, I scribble the bare bones of this paragraph by torchlight on the veranda of my bungalow-tent. The night sounds would be frightening if, like Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, I were bivouacked in the open. Birds over the water – cranes, I think – are whooping like drunken oboists in an orchestra of improvisation. There are deep mammalian grunts, coughs, splashings and a long, choking wail that must surely signal the letting of blood. The darkness seethes with teeth, claws and padded feet. Watching a raft of pelicans sailing on the moonlight, I submit to the rush of sentiment. In the end it's not about philosophy or economics. It's about the way we respond to the world around us. Either we feel enriched by the presence of other species, and will honour their right to exist, or we don't.

Next day I visit the cattle. One of the most encouraging features of Ol Pejeta is the absence from the management team of white faces. Most of the specialists – in conservation, agriculture, education, community development, wildlife management
and research – are black Kenyans. The only conspicuous whites are the chief executive Richard Vigne, the security adviser Batian Craig, both of whom are Kenyan-born, and the livestock manager Giles Prettejohn, a fourth-generation Kenyan cattle rancher. To find Prettejohn, Andrew has to drive us – Richard Lamprey and me – far across the plain to a cluster of farm buildings. From a distance it could be mistaken for a transport depot in the Fens. Behind one of the buildings we meet a throng of enormous Marabou storks, whose popular name, ‘undertaker birds', is an apt description both of their sinister aspect and of their morbid habits. I ask Andrew what has attracted them. He points. The building is Ol Pejeta's slaughterhouse, and they are gathered by the drain.

Giles Prettejohn is a bluff, weather-beaten man of the outdoors whose impeccable Home Counties accent would blend him into any gathering of gentlemen farmers at an agricultural show in England. With his boots on the equator, however, he is somewhat more conspicuous. What could be more unlikely, in an area dedicated to African big game, than a beef farmer? Surely, I say, you might as well try to raise seabass in a shark tank as graze cattle in full sight of lions. But Giles is no fantasist. I don't have the statistics to prove it, but I suspect he is one of the biggest beef producers in Kenya. I
do
have stats to show that he runs the biggest herd of pure-bred Boran cattle in the world. Across Ol Pejeta's plains are spread 6,000 – yes,
6,000
– of them, including 2,000 breeding cows. It is a fact that the number of lions in the conservancy has quadrupled in the last six years and has already exceeded their theoretical carrying capacity, but this has little to do with preying on Giles's cattle. Small wonder that visitors come from all over Africa to see in action this remarkable twinning of opposites, which in most parts of the continent, including South Africa, would be anathema for reasons both ideological (the natural
sanctity of wildlife reserves) and commonsensical (the exposure of cows to predators). Everything here is counter-intuitive. The cattle not only thrive and make good money, but they have turned out to be powerful allies of the wildlife.

The Borans with their fatty humps have a primitive look about them. This is not misleading, for they are antiquity on the hoof. Giles, who knows as much about the breed as any man alive, tells me that they arrived in Africa from India some 2,000 years ago, and were kept by the tribe of the same name – the Boran of north-east Kenya and southern Ethiopia. Given the hostility of the equatorial environment – scrappy forage, drought, disease – the animals were necessarily small and hardy. Recently they have been beefed up by cross-breeding – a bit of shorthorn here, a bit of Hereford there – but not so much as to change their appearance or character, and certainly not their attraction for predators.

As lions hunt by stealth and not speed, much of their killing is done in the dark. Compared to the ill-tempered, muscular aggression of buffalo and the agile speed of gazelles, the docile, slow-moving cattle look like the world's biggest free picnic. But Giles has a simple and ingenious answer to the Borans' nocturnal vulnerability. It also explains some puzzling brown circular patches which I noticed from the air. He takes me first to see a 500-strong herd of pregnant cows, grazing freely on the plain and watched over by herdsmen. Then he shows me the magic ingredient.

It is called a
boma
. In principle it's like a native
kraal
, a circular enclosure within which cattle are kept secure at night, but unlike a
kraal
it doesn't involve mud walls or palisades, and – this is the essential difference – it is
movable.
Sections of tubular aluminium fencing are driven into the ground and pinned together in a circle, enclosing an area about the size of
a tennis court. Into this small area at night, 500 cattle will be packed so tightly that they cannot move. Their immobility is essential. It means that if lions visit the
boma
at night, the Borans are unable to stampede. If they did, the
boma
would be knocked over and the lions would have an orgy. It also mimics the Borans' natural behaviour. At night on open pasture, for comfort and protection, they will instinctively form a huddle. The fencing is not proof against incursion by lions – they could jump over it if they wanted to – but their innate wariness of buffaloes inhibits them from leaping into a mass of cattle. Even if they did make a kill within the
boma
, they would be unable to escape over the fence with it.

This does not mean an end to all predation. Thwarted at night, the lions turn their attention to daytime when the sheer weight of numbers means that cattle and cats are bound to meet at some point. Giles loses about sixty-five animals a year, which from a 6,000-strong herd he reckons is acceptable. If a particular lion makes too much of a nuisance of itself, then it can be darted and moved away. The cattle themselves are constantly shifting to new grazing, and the
bomas
are moved every three weeks. Something magical then happens. You get a clue just by looking at an empty
boma.
The ground inside is entirely bare of grass, not a blade anywhere, just a deep dark churn of well-watered manure. You can smell it, the distilled and well-ripened essence of cow. Insects ping off your skin like hail. Pumped full of nitrates and phosphates, the ground is a brimming reservoir of pent-up energy. At the first slick of rain, due any day now, it will explode into life. And here's the magic. The new growth will not be the same rank old bamboo grass that was there before. It will be of a wholly different kind. In a sudden flood of emerald green there will appear star grass (of the species
Cynodon
), which is much
more palatable and nutritious for the animals. Why this happens, no one seems to know. What matters is that it
does
happen, and that it is yet another link in Ol Pejeta's virtuous circle. What's good for the Borans is good for the plains game that moves in behind them. What's good for the plains game is good for the predators. What's good for the predators is good for the tourists and hence for everything that depends on their money.

Nor is that the only gain. Wild buffalo carry East Coast fever, a tick-borne disease which even an indigenous breed like the Borans cannot survive. For this reason the cattle have to be sprayed regularly with insecticide, which has not only the desired effect of keeping the cattle healthy but also prevents the transfer of ticks to other species. All this is well and good, but there is more to the story than its incidental benefits. Giles is first and foremost a stock farmer, and it matters that the herd makes sense economically. Back at the farm he shows me the slaughterhouse. The day's work is over and a thicket of cream-coloured carcasses hangs from hooks, giving off that odour of freshly killed meat that you either love or hate. Each side shows a layer of fat and well-marbled flesh, just the way a good butcher likes it. Every week Giles sends between fifty and sixty carcasses to the Nairobi meat market, where they fetch premium prices. Because I've never seen one butchered before, I'm interested in the hump. At 50 per cent fat it is the richest cut on the carcass, particularly prized, Giles tells me, by Nairobi's Asian community, who like to boil and slice it very thin. My one regret about the sumptuous meals at Kicheche Camp is that hump never appears on the menu (though I do enjoy a plateful of stir-fried Boran steak).

In a hungry pan-African market, none of this passes unnoticed. Demand is high, especially from South Africa, which
imports Boran embryos direct from Ol Pejeta (embryos only, because it is illegal to move live animals across national borders). Though ranching in South Africa is kept separate from wildlife management, visitors from elsewhere – Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia – are showing interest in the full Ol Pejeta model. For Fauna & Flora International it is a spectacularly powerful testament to the viability of what might have seemed a most improbable kind of investment. It's not quite the lion lying down with the lamb, but standing up with the Boran runs it close. Yet you never forget where you are. The wilderness may be managed, but it is wilderness all the same. In all the many miles that Andrew drives me, I never see an empty landscape. When the time comes for Richard Lamprey to depart, we find his Cessna is sharing the airstrip with zebras, warthogs, Grant's gazelles, a Jackson's hartebeest and a giraffe. Wherever flyers in Africa gather, there is gallows talk – remembrances of this old acquaintance or that coming down in the bush, or of a pilot of long experience finally copping the Big One, often as a result of wildlife on the strip. Richard, who has survived his share of incidents, takes his time checking the aircraft over. Not even the fuel gauge is taken on trust – he checks the level with a dipstick. It brings home to me how remote, how wild, this place really is. Take away the aeroplane and the Land Cruiser, and there's nothing here that would strike a Gordon-Cumming or a Selous as remotely untypical of the nineteenth century. In all important respects, and despite all the care lavished upon it, this is quintessential Africa, exactly as nature meant it to be, and it's humans who must adapt. Flying from here demands a technique not taught to pilots at Heathrow. Taxiing is as much about clearing animals from the track as it is about lining up for take-off. Then there can be no hanging about. Quick as
you can, you have to turn and make your run before the moment passes. Only the giraffe doesn't move. It stands at the end of the strip, head like a windsock. As much as the mountains and trees, it seems to belong to the solid fabric of the place, part of the landscape. It doesn't flinch even as the Cessna, suddenly tiny, flashes over its head. The plane climbs rapidly, turns south and dissolves into silence.

That should have been the end of the chapter. During the writing of it, however, I took a short holiday in Istanbul. We did all the usual things – a trip along the Bosporus, visits to the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, archaeology museum, spice market, the Topkapi Palace. In a far corner of the Topkapi stands the Baghdad Pavilion, built in the 1640s and used during the Ottoman Empire for Cabinet meetings. Descriptions of the decorative art at Topkapi tend to overwork the word ‘exquisite'. But what else can you say? Inside the Baghdad Pavilion you can't see the walls for all the photographers taking close-ups of the detail. There is a famous classical fireplace, framed by ceramic tiles depicting birds; niches along the walls decorated with Iznik tiles older than the building; an ornate silver brazier given by Louis XIV. The whole thing stands as a monument to the absolute power of a Sultanate that was never more than a handclap away from anything it wanted. Human lives were cheap; animal lives worth only what could be made from their body parts. Truly, this often was exquisite. The pavilion's dome is lined with floral patterns made from gazelle leather. Window shutters and cabinets are inlaid with mother-of-pearl, turtleshell and ivory. But this was all so long ago, long before it was understood that animals were a finite resource, that there is no sense of outrage that gazelles, elephants and turtles had to die for a decorator's whim. You
can't blame a sultan for being a man of his time. The world is different now. No monarch of
this
time would indulge such lethal ostentation.

But then we go back to our hotel and switch on the news. There is a royal scandal. King Juan Carlos of Spain – honorary president of the Spanish WWF – has been caught elephant-shooting in Botswana, and has made a grovelling apology to his people.
I am very sorry. I made a mistake. It won't happen again.
The mistake, it turns out, was to have tripped in a hunting lodge and broken his hip. News of the mishap dominated the Spanish headlines for days, arousing the kind of passionate anger for which that country is unrivalled. Politicians across the spectrum at last had something they could agree about – the king would have to eat crow. When he did, however, it was not for killing elephants that he apologised. It was for having taken such an expensive holiday at a time when his subjects were suffering hardship and the economy had holes in its shoes. Killing elephants was wrong because poor people could not afford it.

Worse was to follow. Back in England I find an email from Brian Jackman telling me that Ol Pejeta's near neighbour, the Lewa conservancy (a favourite, apparently, of young British royals, where William proposed to Kate), has lost a pregnant black rhino, shot by poachers despite one of the tightest security operations in Africa. He reminds me that more African ivory was intercepted in 2011 than in any year of the last two decades. Cameroon's Bouba N'Djida reserve alone had lost more than 450 elephants. In South Africa, the number of rhinos lost since the beginning of the year (I am writing this in mid April 2012) had already reached 170. I have enjoyed Ol Pejeta. It has been one of those rare and exalted things that might be called an experience of a lifetime. Briefly I have been intoxicated by optimism. I have seen how life for animals
can mean livelihoods for people; how good people can make a difference. But there is no hiding from the bad. Brian quotes a friend of his, centrally involved in the conservation of rhinos, who speaks unemotionally of ‘an unfolding disaster for Africa'. I know now why the mole matters. Conservationists in soapbox mode tend too easily to slip into eco-jargon, as if words like
biomass, sustainability
and
biodiversity
carried some unquestionable authority, like edicts from the Vatican. Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project and as much a champion of plain speaking as he is of the environment, tells me of a survey at the Natural History Museum which revealed that 85 per cent of its visitors didn't know what biodiversity meant. ‘That tells you two things,' he says. ‘It tells you first of all,
Ouch!
, in terms of our education system. But it also tells you what a bunch of arrogant tosspots we all are, using a phrase that 85 per cent of people don't understand, when we could say
variety of life
.'