Kenya Rancher Game for Replacing Cattle With Zebra, Eland, Even Giraffe

NAIROBI, Kenya —  Once or twice a week, in a country where hunting is banned and poachers are harshly punished, Philip Tilley and a team of trained marksmen load their rifles and climb quietly into a truck.

They ride off into the night in pursuit of ostrich, zebra, wildebeest, impala, oryx and giraffe.

“We shoot at night, between 7 p.m. and midnight. It doesn’t scare the other animals, so you can still get close enough to shoot them,” Tilley says.

As the croppers approach meandering groups of animals, they pick their targets and quietly maneuver their truck to get as close as they can before shooting.

“We go for a brain shot every time,” Tilley says.

The hunters are not in search of the usual trophies--ivory, rhino horns or skins. They want the meat. This is not pleasure, not adventure. This is business.

These nocturnal hunts occur on a ranch owned by a fourth-generation white Kenyan named David Hopcraft. Hopcraft, who has a Ph.D. from Cornell University in ecology and wildlife, enlisted Tilley to help pursue a radical vision to save Africa’s wildlife, restore its range lands and create a new industry.

Tilley’s nighttime hunts are an experiment sanctioned by the Kenyan government. Hopcraft’s idea is to manage game for meat, as an ecologically superior alternative to raising cattle.

The slaughtering of the animals on the Hopcraft ranch follows a ritual of sorts.

“We have a Muslim in the car,” Tilley says. “After that brain shot, while the heart is still beating, he runs out of the car, turns to Mecca, says a prayer and slits the animal’s throat.

“We pick it up by its hind leg until it’s properly bled.”

With the religious rites concluded, Tilley’s team moves quickly. The animals are loaded on the truck and taken to a small shed that serves as a slaughterhouse.

As the night wears on, the animals are quickly and efficiently skinned and butchered. “They can stay overnight there because it’s cool--about 14 or 15 degrees C.”

The skins are spread out, salted and stacked in layers. The horns and skulls are thrown into buckets of caustic solvents to be cleaned and sold for export. By morning, the meat is ready to be shipped. It cannot be preserved. Because of its low fat content, it turns dark when it is frozen.

The idea of game ranching has been attacked by researchers at a livestock research institute sponsored by Western countries in Kenya. They say that Hopcraft overstates the harm cattle cause to range land and that he fails to appreciate the critical importance of cattle to many African farmers.

Conservationists are divided. Some agree with Hopcraft that by attaching economic value to game animals, Hopcraft is creating incentives to protect them. Others see the legalized hunting as a first step toward further exploitation and possible destruction of one of the world’s largest remaining populations of migrating wild animals.

For Tilley, the shooting and butchering of the noble animals of the East African plains is simply work. He isn’t constrained by sentiment or rambling Hemingwayesque meditations on man’s encounter with the wild. He has made harvesting game methodical and routine. Except when it comes to giraffes. The killing of giraffes he leaves to someone else.

“I don’t like eating giraffe, but I think that’s a mental thing. You can get close to them and they’ve got these big eyes looking at you. I just can’t dig into a giraffe steak.”

Tilley, an Australian, was trained as a mechanical engineer. “I used to do design at a steel works--I pushed a pencil around,” he says.

Fed up with pencil-pushing, he set out from Australia in the 1970s to see the world, making his way to England. In 1976, he left London to drive overland through Europe, into North Africa, across the desert and the Sahel into the central African jungles. It took him two years to reach Nairobi, where he decided to stay.

That meant he would have to raise some cash. Tilley went to the post office, where he lingered outside, looking for someone to buy his Land Rover.

“This tall game rancher said he would buy the Land Rover if I came out for a couple of days to fix a few things.” Tilley went out to the ranch that day and has never left.

Hopcraft’s ranch is one of about 40 game ranches operating under special permit in Kenya, Tilley says. “This is an experimental thing. We’re not allowed to advertise that wildebeest has meat that is 99% fat-free and has no antibiotics,” he says.

That is only one of the advantages that game has over cattle. Game animals are resistant to the notorious tsetse fly, which ranges over large reaches of the African continent.

The carrier of trypanosomiasis, a fatal disease of cattle, the tsetse fly makes cattle ranching impossible on much of Africa’s range land. (The tsetse fly also transmits a human form of trypanosomiasis, known more commonly as sleeping sickness.)

Range land gets too little rainfall for farming, so the range in the tsetse belt, which covers much of sub-Saharan Africa, is unusable for the production of food.

Game ranching changes that. The animals that Tilley pursues at night have lived with tsetse flies for millions of years. The animals have become resistant to the cattle disease. They don’t get trypanosomiasis. “This system works, and livestock doesn’t,” Hopcraft declares.

Game animals have an important advantage over cattle even in areas free of the tsetse fly, he says. Cattle punish the range land, overgrazing and eradicating the grasses and shrubs, a dangerous condition that can lead to erosion and the disappearance of topsoil, eventually turning grassland into desert.

Livestock “eliminates your wildlife resource,” Hopcraft says. “You destroy your range, and you end up with no profit.”

Hopcraft’s 20,000-acre ranch sprawls across gently rolling countryside 20 miles east of Nairobi, along the road to Mombasa. To the south lies land belonging to the cattle-rearing Masai. Visible on the western horizon is the jagged, shadowy profile of the Ngong Hills, the site of the ranch Isak Dinesen made famous in “Out of Africa.”

Hopcraft is middle-aged, lean and lanky, with a long, narrow face, a square jaw, a thick, gray mustache and a bush of curly gray hair.

Last year, he welcomed half a dozen American journalists on a reporting trip sponsored by the U.S. Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

A charming host, Hopcraft welcomed the group with a buffet lunch of zebra, eland, kongoni (an antelope), tomatoes and cucumbers, boiled potatoes, brown bread, Tusker beer and coffee with hot milk and unbleached sugar. The meats, served roasted with browned onions, had a rich flavor similar to beef, with only a hint of gaminess.

After lunch, Hopcraft lit his pipe and settled into a chair in the large, open living room of his house, a sprawling stone structure with wooden timbers supporting a thatched roof. The entrance, which has no door, opens on a view across the ranch to the Ngong Hills.

As Hopcraft spoke to his visitors, a full-grown cheetah named Shalla, Hopcraft’s house cat, drifted lazily in and out of the room, occasionally nuzzling and unnerving one or the other of the guests.

Hopcraft proved to be eloquent and inexhaustible on the subject of game ranching. But his sometimes too-pat answers to questions leave a lingering impression that there is more to the story.

His critics are quick to agree. Hopcraft makes the logic of game ranching seem unassailable. But he has been assailed on all sides, by conservationists, by cattle ranchers, and by researchers who don’t believe that game ranching can be sustained without depleting wildlife populations.

Hopcraft is unmoved, blaming the criticism on a closed-door scientific mentality.

“We meet a lot of traditional opposition and a lot of support,” Hopcraft says. “A lot of scientists don’t want to be confused with facts.”

That kind of talk elicits an angry response from scientists at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi.

“The underlying assumption--that cattle destroys the environment and wildlife doesn’t--is not true,” says Susan MacMillan, the institute’s spokeswoman. Recent studies dismiss the role of cattle in desertification, she says. And wildlife populations can suddenly erupt with devastating consequences for range land, she says.

The fundamental flaw in Hopcraft’s argument is that game ranching is not practical on a large scale, says Alan Teale, director of the institute’s trypanosomiasis research program. Expanding Hopcraft’s game-ranching experiment would deplete wildlife populations and would never provide enough meat to supply Africa, Teale says.

“You have to ask yourself what area of land you’d need to provide Nairobi with meat in 25 years,” Teale says. “If you want to see what happens to wildlife that’s been harvested, look what’s happened to the world’s fisheries.” Many are severely depleted.

Another concern is milk, an important part of the African diet. Even Hopcraft has not suggested trying to milk wildebeest or gazelles.

Hopcraft says that game ranching is one more way, along with big game hunting, to put an economic value on wildlife. That, he argues, is the key to saving it.

Hopcraft takes his cues partly from southern Africa, where game ranching is more common. Governments there have encouraged it. Although proposals to allow elephant hunting and limited ivory trade have been rebuffed by international organizations, some conservation organizations favor other kinds of economic exploitation of game.

In a 1993 report, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources said private investment in game-viewing, safari hunting and game ranching “is increasingly recognized as an important factor in development.”

“To foreclose these options by preventing the generation of revenues from the harvesting of game meat and trophy hunting would be a major step backward,” the organization concluded. The organization’s opinion is important, because it is more than simply another conservation group. It serves as the official monitor of world wildlife populations.

East Africa still has stunning populations of wildlife and some of the world’s most spectacular nature reserves. But the Serengeti and the other famous national parks are slowly being strangled by a tightening ring of development. Swelling populations are spilling over into the parks on all sides.

Without a clear economic incentive to conserve wildlife, the wildlife will inevitably disappear, Hopcraft says.

“It has to be the people on the ground who benefit, because then they will protect it,” he says. Hunting and tourism are all aimed at foreign visitors, not locals, and the revenue they generate varies with the health of the American and European economies. Game ranching provides income at home.

Hopcraft’s experiment has reverberated throughout the angry politics of wildlife in Kenya. Richard Leakey, the noted paleontologist and former head of the Kenya Wildlife Service who is now leading an opposition party, was forced to resign from the wildlife service in part because of his efforts to encourage wildlife exploitation by Hopcraft and others.

“He came under very heavy criticism for that,” says David Western, a noted conservationist who replaced Leakey as head of the wildlife service.

Western believes that game ranching will ultimately become one choice on a palette of conservation alternatives. Private exploitation of wildlife will be critical for the maintenance of wildlife populations outside national parks, which occupy only 7% of Kenya, Western says.

The creation of the parks and a ban on big game hunting “took away any use of wildlife as far as the local communities were concerned, and they became antagonistic toward wildlife,” he says. “Wildlife became even more of a loss to the landowner at a time when the land pressures were very acute.”

Many think big game hunting by trophy-seeking foreigners will soon resume in Kenya. “I don’t particularly like it,” says Hopcraft. But he concedes that he will probably get into that business, too, when it becomes legal.

In the meantime, he claims to be making a healthy return on game ranching. Over 14 years, he has produced an average of 24 tons per year of edible product on 20,000 acres.

“We reckon we’re making approximately 10 times what we ever made from cattle,” he says. “During the dry season, our neighbors are wiped out, and they buy grass from us.” Because Hopcraft’s animals graze more gently than cattle, he has surplus grass that he can cut and sell.

“A ranch like this might make $10,000 to $15,000 per year from cattle. We’re making 10 times that. When I started marketing this, I carried three carcasses into town in the back of a truck.”

Now Hopcraft supplies, among others, The Carnivore, a popular tourist restaurant in Nairobi, where waiters roam with huge skewers of broiled meats, sliding big chunks onto diners’ plates. The horns and skulls turn up at a specialty store in New York City.

Hopcraft has been accused of pilfering animals from national parks to keep his ranch supplied, a charge he laughs off. “How the hell I’d get them here, I don’t know,” he says.

Despite his enthusiasm for game ranching, Hopcraft once shared Tilley’s squeamishness about giraffes.

“When we started, no one could convince me to shoot a giraffe,” he says. “They have long eyelashes. They’re beautiful.”

His feelings changed with the weather. “We had a drought and saw half of our giraffes die. Believe me, when you see an animal starve to death, it changes your view.”