The project operates entirely outside protected areas, on private and community lands in Laikipia, Samburu and Isiolo counties in northern Kenya. In 2014, we sought to build on this success by expanding our work to include cheetahs, renaming the project the Kenya Rangelands Wild Dog and Cheetah Project. Over the course of a decade, the project witnessed an eight-fold increase in the numbers of wild dogs in the project area. The Samburu-Laikipia Wild Dog Project, established in 2001, sought to identify a combination of traditional livestock management, conservation of wild prey, disease management and local outreach which could allow wild dogs to persist in a human-dominated landscape.
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Unfortunately, there are few tried-and-tested methods for achieving these objectives. In Kenya, as elsewhere, a sustainable approach to conserving wild dogs and cheetahs, both inside and outside protected areas, demands protecting livestock from depredation, reducing disease threats, and improving local tolerance for wild carnivores. Local people, who rely upon these hostile ecosystems for grazing, bushmeat, and water, are among the most impoverished and marginalised in the world. Much of the land they inhabit is dry and inhospitable, unsuited to growing crops. More than half of these animals live outside parks, alongside local people and their livestock. Today, fewer than 7,000 wild dogs and 10,000 cheetahs are thought to remain in Africa. Instead, the survival of cheetahs and wild dogs will depend upon sharing the landscape with people. But space on this scale is in short supply: only a handful of protected areas are big enough for these two increasingly threatened species. Vast areas are the only hope for these species to persist in the long term. They, more than any other of Africa’s large carnivores, need space to survive.
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Two species, African wild dog and the cheetah, are symbols of Africa’s remaining wilderness. Its last wild landscapes are being broken up, and its ecosystems are becoming damaged.