National Geographic

90 percent of its original range. Some expertspredict that within another 20 years, lions willbe reduced to zoo-like numbers, living underzoo-like conditions. Every deliberate poisoningbrings Kenya one step closer to what the African-wildlife photographer Peter Beard famouslycalled “the end of the game.”PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD have long usedpoisons to hunt game and kill enemies. In EastAfrica the Acocanthera tree contains a com-pound that even in small doses can arrest theheart of a large mammal and has been popularfor centuries. More recently the use of strychninefor “pest” control was so routine that none otherthan George Adamson, the celebrated conserva-tionist known fondly in Kenya as Baba ya Simba(Father of Lions in Swahili), used it to dispatchhyenas he deemed a nuisance.But the most fateful change, the mixed blessingthat still plagues much of Africa and countrieselsewhere, including the United States, was thedevelopment of synthetic poisons— insecticidesand herbicides—for agriculture. Beginning in the1980s, when the human population started toexplode across Africa and competition for spaceand food increased sharply, landowners andpastoralists found that pesticides could also beemployed to kill predators (lions, leopards, wilddogs, jackals), scavengers (hyenas, vultures), andcrop raiders (elephants, certain birds). At somepoint people also started using the deadly com-pounds to poach ducks and other waterfowl andthen sell them as food.A national movement to address poisoningbegan when Nature Kenya, East Africa’s old-est natural history organization, learned thatfarmers were using pesticides to kill lions in thenorth. Darcy Ogada, who was on Nature Kenya’sBird Committee, volunteered to design and over-see surveys to gauge the extent of the problem.She enlisted an aspiring ornithologist namedMartin Odino to conduct the surveys.One place they focused on was the Bunyalarice fields, in western Kenya, along Lake Victo-ria. According to unoicial reports, people therewere killing birds with the pesticide Furadan5G, a purple granular substance made by a U.S.company, Philadelphia-based FMC. Furadan 5Gcontains the compound carbo furan, a neurotoxinso poisonous that it had been banned or severelyrestricted in Canada, the European Union, Aus-tralia, and China and had been prohibited for useon food crops in the U.S. Yet Kenya had allowedthe substance to be imported via the JuancoGroup, a distributor in Nairobi.During his first visit to the Bunyala region,Odino found that most agro-vets—smallagricultural- supply stores in rural areas—soldFuradan 5G to anyone. He confirmed thatpoachers were applying Furadan to rice tokill ducks and to snails to kill African openbillstorks that feed on them. Animals were dyingby the thousands. Poachers sold the birds tolocal residents, who believed that contami-nated bush meat, if properly prepared, couldbe rendered harmless, or almost so. Men eat-ing soup containing poisoned bird parts toldOdino that their knees felt weak afterward, asymptom consistent with a compound that candisrupt brain-cell activity. But no studies havebeen conducted.Ogada took the findings to Paula Kahumbu,CEO of WildlifeDirect and one of the most influ-ential conservationists in Kenya, who had beenhearing about similar incidents elsewhere inthe country. Kahumbu assembled a task force toaddress the problem. The inaugural meeting, held94 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC