Kenyan herders kill 10 lions in fight to stop them preying on livestock during drought

Beset by drought, herders in East Africa have killed 10 marauding lions in a single week after they preyed on villagers’ livestock.

Among the dead was one of the oldest wild lions in Kenya, a 19-year-old male named Loonkiito. The frail, elderly big cat — lions typically don’t live past age 15 — had wandered out of the Amboseli national park into a village seeking food, Kenya Wildlife Service spokesperson Paul Jinaro told the Associated Press.

Loonkiito had left the protected area and wandered into a livestock pen because he was starving, the conservation organization Lion Guardians told CNN. The livestock owner then killed him.

The government of Kenya is urging herders to contact wildlife authorities instead of taking matters into their own hands, concerned about the number of deaths.

But amid the drought, one of the worst that the East African region has seen in decades, herders are fighting to protect their livestock as the dry, overheated conditions claim animal lives.

Herders speared six other lions from Amboseli on Saturday alone after they killed 11 goats in the area of Mbirikani, in Kajiado county. That brought the total up to 10 for the week.

The latest killings marked an escalation of a worsening human-wildlife conflict, conservation authorities said, and it was “an unusually large number of lions to be killed at one go,” a Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) spokesperson told CNN on Sunday.

The agency met with locals and government officials on Saturday to talk about the killings, CNN reported.

“The discussions centered on exploring ways to minimize the risk of human-wildlife conflict, including developing early warning systems to alert communities to the presence of wildlife in their vicinity,” the KWS said in a statement obtained by CNN.

Loonkiito’s killing was a “tough situation for both sides, the people and the lion,” Lion Guardians told BBC News, calling him “a symbol of resilience and coexistence.”

“This is the breaking point for human-wildlife conflict, and we need to do more as a country to preserve lions, which are facing extinction,” wildlife conservationist and chief executive officer of WildlifeDirect Paula Kahumbu told BBC News.

With News Wire Services