Hauke-Peter Vehrs (Project A04 “Future Conservation”) and David Anderson (Project A02 “Past Futures”) argue that the sharp decline of wildlife in Kenya’s Baringo region during the first half of the 20th century was caused mainly by intensive hunting by European settlers and sports hunters, along with colonial-era land-use changes—not by local hunters or poaching. They also challenge the idea that colonial conservation policies effectively protected wildlife, showing that conservation rhetoric often failed to prevent habitat loss and overhunting.
Hunting, Environmental Change, and the Defaunation of Wildlife in Baringo, Kenya (1840–1977)
By Hauke-Peter Vehrs and David M. Anderson
Abstract
This article takes a long-term view of the history of Kenya’s wildlife, to consider the gradual defaunation of wildlife that took place over the first half of the twentieth century. In the Baringo lowlands of Kenya’s northern Rift Valley, a district famous for ivory hunting in the nineteenth century and an area with a dense wildlife population, the depletion of Kenya’s wildlife populations was not the result of hunting by locals or increased poaching, but rather the product of intensified hunting by white settlers and licensed sportsmen from the end of the nineteenth century through the 1950s, combined with major changes in land use brought about under colonial rule from the 1920s. Despite Kenya’s colonial rhetoric of conservation, Baringo (and many other locations like it) was never protected from the predations of hunters or the impact of land consolidation.
Reference
Vehrs, H.P., Anderson, D. 2026. Hunting, Environmental Change, and the Defaunation of Wildlife in Baringo, Kenya (1840–1977). Environmental History, Volume 31 (2), DOI
