Ten Lions and a Hard Winter

Ten lions turned up dead in Tanzania last Friday. Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which is a crater so beautiful it'll make you feel guilty for never having seen it. UNESCO World Heritage Site, meaning a roomful of people in nice clothes agreed it was worth protecting, and they were right, it is. Gorgeous country. Full of the animals tourists fly halfway around the world to photograph. Also full of people, pastoral communities, cattle herders, families who've been working that land since before anyone thought to call it a heritage of anything.

Preliminary findings suggest poison. An investigation is underway.

I'll tell you what that investigation will find, or won't find, and I mean no disrespect to the investigators. They'll find somebody. And finding somebody won't touch whatever drove somebody to reach for poison in the first place.

Now, we don't have lions in Chamberlain's Bend. We have coyotes, which are to lions what a screen door is to a vault, but the principle holds. You lose chickens. You lose the occasional calf. The first few times, you chalk it up to living where the world hasn't been fully tamed. But everybody's got a threshold. You lose enough, in a row, at the wrong time of year, and the cost of doing business starts looking like the cost of going out of business entirely. That's not philosophy. That's arithmetic.

I'm not telling you that poisoning lions is right. It isn't. Tanzania holds roughly half the wild lions left on the entire planet. Half. That is not a margin you can keep reducing without eventually running out of margin. But a man whose cattle are being killed by lions is not running the global numbers in his head. He's thinking about his cattle, and his children, and whether the season is going to close him out. You can't talk him into patience with a statistic. Patience doesn't feed anybody.

Aunt Vi would say the whole situation is what happens when you draw a line around a place and forget there are people inside the line. She's said similar things about the county redistricting, and about the new zoning rules, and about at least one potluck seating arrangement that I won't get into here. The point stands regardless.

This is the thing about conservation that doesn't make the brochures. The animals and the people are not separate problems. They are the same problem wearing different hats. You can pour money into protection programs, and Tanzania has received a lot of international conservation funding over the years, but if the family losing cattle to lions sees none of that money and faces all of that loss, the math doesn't change for them. They're still losing. The lions are still winning. And one night, somebody reaches a conclusion that no amount of outside sympathy prepared them not to reach.

There are programs that try to bridge this. Compensation schemes, community wildlife management, livestock protection training. Some of them work reasonably well. Most of them are underfunded and slow, which is a hard combination when the lions are fast. Pastor Holmgren would say the spirit is willing but the budget is weak, and he would mean it as a joke, but he would also mean it.

The harder question, the one worth sitting with, is whether we've built conservation as something that happens to communities rather than with them. A place like Ngorongoro is managed under rules that have shifted over the decades, with pastoral families caught in the middle of arguments between governments and international bodies about what the land is for and who gets to say. That's a long time to feel like a complication in someone else's plan for your home.

Big Earl at the grain elevator has a saying, which is that you can't manage land you don't understand, and you can't understand land you've never had to live off of. He applies this to commodity markets, mostly, but it travels.

I was talking to the Lindqvist twins about this, separately, because they're not talking to each other right now for reasons that remain unclear to everyone including, I suspect, them. They agreed, which tells you something, that the situation in Tanzania is genuinely complicated and that simple answers are going to make it worse. That's a rare point of consensus from that quarter and I'm noting it for the record.

The lions are dead. That's a real loss, not a symbolic one. Ten animals from a population the world can't afford to keep shrinking. The people who live near that crater are not villains. They are people in a hard spot, which is a category most of us have occupied at one point or another, usually with lower stakes and better options. The distance between their hard spot and ours is mostly geography.

What I keep coming back to, sitting here in Chamberlain's Bend where the coyotes are manageable and the winters are long, is that the worst outcomes rarely start with bad people. They start with a problem that doesn't have a good solution nearby, and a wait that's longer than anyone can hold out for. Fix the wait, or fix the distance to the solution, and you change the ending.

The lions that are gone are gone. The ones still living are worth the harder work of figuring that out.