Wild life | 5 October 2017

Laikipia

Ripping up the black cotton soil on the farm’s high savannah I get a sense of what it must have been like to be a sodbuster on the Great Plains of America 150 years ago. Riding my big yellow tractor I find it thrilling to plunge through virgin land that has been innocent since time began, but it also makes me feel intensely sad that it had to come to this. Through the clouds of dust and diesel fumes I can see a giraffe pouting at me from above a stand of acacia trees that will soon be torn out. Herds of zebra, oryx and eland are retreating as the lines of freshly turned tilth advance across tawny grasslands stretching northwards all the way to Ethiopia. I am destroying wildness in order to survive. We never built a safari camp for tourists. It might have justified keeping it ‘wild’ but we enjoyed having this to ourselves. Where I am tearing up the earth today I often watched cheetah hunting. When the troubles began, it became hard to attract visitors and tourism would have been a bad bet. Instead we opted to ranch beef cattle and we still do that. Today a herd of my Boran bulls grazing on wild pasture made for such a perfect sight that I could not imagine why anything must change. A year ago a multitude of men armed with guns came down from the north —where, across 14 million acres, all the grass is gone and the soil beneath it too, so that it is nothing but rocks and gullies. They burst into our farm and took our grass. We had protected the pasture but many people said we were mean not to share it with all those cattle from 14 million acres, and in time our land started to resemble an eroded planet too.