NAIVASHA, KENYA — For the farmers of Kenya, life is a constant contest for grass and water between their herds and the wild animals that share the land.
Now they are waging a new struggle, this time against the international animal welfare lobby. Pleading poverty, the farmers want to open their land to wealthy fee-paying hunters. The advocacy groups are firmly opposed.
The standoff has made Kenya the latest and perhaps most dramatic arena for the international debate over hunting and its role in financing conservation.
A million tourists a year spend more than $580 million to see and photograph lions, elephants, gazelle and other wildlife on this East African country's savannas.
But the revenue isn't enough to protect the animals.
Only 8% of land in Kenya, a country twice the size of Nevada, is set aside for wildlife. The rest is privately or communally owned, and studies show that is where most of Kenya's wild animals live.
By some estimates, wildlife populations have dropped 60% since the mid-1970s and continue to plummet because of human encroachment and illegal hunting for food.
Landowners say they can continue to maintain animal sanctuaries only if they can sell hunting rights. They are not proposing that hunters be allowed to kill endangered species or given access to protected areas. Only common animals on private land would be hunted, and the killing would be controlled in a way that would sustain their numbers, advocates say.
"The losses we are getting from livestock predation, or even medical bills for people who have been injured by elephants, buffaloes and even lions, is quite high," said Yusuf Ole Petenya, secretary of the Shompole Community Trust, a tribal foundation in animal-rich southern Kenya.
The trust opened a luxury wildlife lodge to help lift Petenya's Masai clan out of poverty, but "it's not working," he said, because the cost of conservation outstrips the profit from tourism.
Kenya has substandard healthcare, low education levels and a government that barely functions outside Nairobi, the capital. There is no money to buy land or pay people to protect wildlife.
Kenya banned sport hunting in 1977, but allowed limited hunting to cull animals and harvest game meat until 2003, when animal rights groups managed to shut it down.
