Wildlife and human safety in the Tarangire ecosystem, Tanzania

Abstract

Coexistence of people and wildlife outside protected areas is of critical conservation importance. However, human-wildlife interactions on shared landscapes can produce negative outcomes for wildlife populations and people. This article focuses on the effects of wildlife on local people's lived experiences of physical safety in the Tarangire ecosystem of northern Tanzania. The Tarangire ecosystem supports a diverse array of wildlife species of global conservation significance, encompassing several national parks, community-based conservation areas, forest reserves, and trophy hunting blocks. From the perspectives of local agropastoral Maasai communities, coexisting with wildlife is a routine part of everyday life, though some species are dangerous and pose threats to physical safety. These human security concerns compound the economic impacts of wildlife on local livelihoods, manifest in the forms of crop raiding, livestock depredation, and property damage. Based on mixed qualitative methods including ethnographic fieldwork (2019–2020; 2022; 2023), participant observation, household surveys (n = 1076), and in-depth interviews (n = 240), this paper identifies the species of particular concern to communities. Elephants, spotted hyenas, buffalo, and lions pose significant threats to human security. Venomous snakes and leopards are also safety concerns, but to a lesser degree. The anthropological dimensions of these threats to physical safety are underrepresented in the literature on human-wildlife conflict. This paper spotlights three recent incidents of people being killed by wildlife (elephant, hyena, and lion) in the area, and the psychosocial consequences that have since rippled across local communities. People expressed feelings of fear, resentment, anger, grief, and insecurity born of their experiences coexisting with large nondomestic mammals. Wildlife attacks on people engender material and emotional impacts with traumatic aftereffects. These human dimensions of wildlife are significant for equity reasons in and of themselves, and also for environmental sustainability as they affect people's tolerance for living with wildlife. Greater attention to the lived experiences of local people is needed to improve conservation practice in northern Tanzania.

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Trees, Forests and People 13 (2023) 100418
Available online 27 July 2023
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Wildlife and human safety in the Tarangire ecosystem, Tanzania
☆
Justin Raycraft
Department of Anthropology, University of Lethbridge, 4401 University Drive West, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, T1K 3M4
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Human-wildlife conict
Human security
Wildlife
Large carnivores
Elephants
Tanzania
Safety
Human-wildlife coexistence
Human dimensions of wildlife
Anthropology
Ethnography
East Africa
Community-based conservation
Tolerance
Attitudes
Equity
Sustainability
Ecological connectivity
Maasai
ABSTRACT
Coexistence of people and wildlife outside protected areas is of critical conservation importance. However,
human-wildlife interactions on shared landscapes can produce negative outcomes for wildlife populations and
people. This article focuses on the effects of wildlife on local people’s lived experiences of physical safety in the
Tarangire ecosystem of northern Tanzania. The Tarangire ecosystem supports a diverse array of wildlife species
of global conservation signicance, encompassing several national parks, community-based conservation areas,
forest reserves, and trophy hunting blocks. From the perspectives of local agropastoral Maasai communities,
coexisting with wildlife is a routine part of everyday life, though some species are dangerous and pose threats to
physical safety. These human security concerns compound the economic impacts of wildlife on local livelihoods,
manifest in the forms of crop raiding, livestock depredation, and property damage. Based on mixed qualitative
methods including ethnographic eldwork (2019–2020; 2022; 2023), participant observation, household sur-
veys (n =1076), and in-depth interviews (n =240), this paper identies the species of particular concern to
communities. Elephants, spotted hyenas, buffalo, and lions pose signicant threats to human security. Venomous
snakes and leopards are also safety concerns, but to a lesser degree. The anthropological dimensions of these
threats to physical safety are underrepresented in the literature on human-wildlife conict. This paper spotlights
three recent incidents of people being killed by wildlife (elephant, hyena, and lion) in the area, and the psy-
chosocial consequences that have since rippled across local communities. People expressed feelings of fear,
resentment, anger, grief, and insecurity born of their experiences coexisting with large nondomestic mammals.
Wildlife attacks on people engender material and emotional impacts with traumatic aftereffects. These human
dimensions of wildlife are signicant for equity reasons in and of themselves, and also for environmental sus-
tainability as they affect people’s tolerance for living with wildlife. Greater attention to the lived experiences of
local people is needed to improve conservation practice in northern Tanzania.
Introduction
Globally, wildlife populations are in decline (Wolf and Ripple 2017;
Ripple et al., 2016). Anthropogenic land use change driven by political
and economic factors has led to fragmentation of ecosystems and loss of
natural habitats for wildlife (Pettersson 2022; Boronyak et al., 2022).
Protected areas have shown utility in some cases as conservation tools
for insulating wildlife from human activities, however, they have pro-
duced mixed social and ecological outcomes across the world (Packer
et al., 2013; Wuerthner 2015; Smith et al., 2010). Protected areas often
encompass insufcient ranges for wildlife (Venumi`
ere-Lefebvre et al.,
2022) and, depending on their institutions for governance and man-
agement, have the potential to dispossess or even displace local human
communities (Brockington 2002; Brockington and Igoe 2006; Igoe
2004). Considering these shortcomings of protected areas, wildlife
practitioners have begun to consider human-wildlife coexistence in rural
areas outside formal protected areas as crucially important (Mkonyi
2022; Lamb et al., 2020; Venumi`
ere-Lefebvre et al., 2022; Kiffner et al.,
2022a). Coexistence scholarship has highlighted the fact that humans
and wildlife do not have mutually exclusive environmental needs and
can theoretically thrive on shared landscapes with proper institutional
frameworks in place for managing land (Hartel et al., 2019). A con-
cerning body of literature on human-wildlife conict, however, high-
lights the potential negative impacts of human practices on wildlife
dynamics, and conversely of wildlife on the wellbeing of human com-
munities (Hill 2004; Kiffner et al., 2022). Human-wildlife interactions
can produce a range of undesirable social outcomes like increased
zoonotic pathogen transmission, livestock depredation, crop destruc-
tion, damage to property, and emotional distress (Carter and Linnell
2016; Barua et al., 2013; Mayberry et al., 2017). They can also render
☆
This article is part of a special issue entitled: “Human Conicts with Forest Wildlife.”
E-mail address: justin.raycraft@uleth.ca.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
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Trees, Forests and People 13 (2023) 100418
2
wildlife vulnerable to poaching, retaliatory killings, and habitat frag-
mentation (Kissui 2008; Felix et al., 2022).
This paper focuses on one key anthropological dimension of human-
wildlife conict—impacts of wildlife on human safety. Wildlife attacks
on humans are increasingly being recognized as a key conservation
challenge in need of further attention. Existing literature in East Africa
on elephants (Thouless 1994; Hoare 2015) and lions (Packer et al.,
2005) point to a range of ecological and social factors that inuence
wildlife attack frequency on humans. This paper contributes to the
existing discourse by focusing on people’s lived experiences of physical
safety in the Tarangire ecosystem of northern Tanzania. It draws from a
long-term ethnographic study (2019–2020; 2022; 2023) of
human-wildlife interactions across twelve villages located adjacent to
conservation areas. The Tarangire ecosystem was selected for this study
as part of a large-scale research project on conservation institutions in
pastoral areas in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. The Tarangire
ecosystem is well-known for its rich biodiversity, healthy populations of
large mammals, and network of protected areas (Kiffner et al., 2022a).
There is a rich body of literature on human-wildlife conict and coex-
istence in the Tarangire ecosystem, but still much need for further
research (Bond et al., 2022; Kiffner et al., 2022a; Kiffner et al., 2022;
Kissui et al., 2022; Lohay et al., 2022). Qualitative research that is
grounded in the lived experiences of local people is currently under-
represented as compared to quantitative social-ecological analyses
(McCabe and Woodhouse, 2022). Using mixed qualitative methods, this
paper reveals the wildlife species that regularly threaten the physical
safety of local agropastoral communities. Some wildlife species pose
signicant safety concerns for local people in their lived environments,
resulting in many cases in injuries and even deaths. Such a consideration
points to a human security issue associated with wildlife conservation
that is of great signicance for policy makers, not only in terms of human
wellbeing, security, and rights, but also as a potential catalyst of retal-
iatory killings of wildlife, resentment towards conservation initiatives,
and alienation of local communities from the central aims of
government policy. Addressing wildlife impacts on human safety in
northern Tanzania is thus important for both social and ecological
reasons.
The ‘materials and methods’ section of this paper provides back-
ground on the Tarangire ecosystem and the local people who inhabit the
area. It then outlines the methodology for data collection and analysis.
The results section presents mixed ethnographic data identifying the
species of particular concern to communities in the context of people’s
lived experiences of physical safety. In the discussion and conclusion,
these ndings are situated in relation to existing human-wildlife coex-
istence scholarship. The key conclusion, drawing from Bencin et al.
(2016), is that governance institutions for managing interactions be-
tween people and wildlife outside protected areas in the Tarangire
ecosystem are currently ineffective, undermining the viability of
long-term coexistence. It is suggested that decision-makers focus on
devolution of governance institutions to ensure that human dimensions
of wildlife management at the community-level are not overlooked by
Tanzania’s centralized wildlife sector.
Materials and methods
Study area
The Tarangire ecosystem spans approximately 25–40,000 km
2
in
northern Tanzania, encompassing Tarangire National Park, Lake
Manyara National Park, and several community-based conservation
areas. In Tanzania, national parks prohibit all forms of local livelihood
activities including livestock grazing, crop cultivation, settlement, and
hunting. The community-based areas in the Tarangire ecosystem are
multiple-use areas with environmental regulations that vary on a case-
by-case basis. The Tarangire ecosystem is mainly covered by Acacia
and Vachellia woodlands (Fig. 1), Commiphora bushlands, and grass-
lands. It supports a wide variety of medium-sized and large mammals of
global conservation importance.
Fig. 1. – This photograph shows Makuyuni village with Esimangore Mountain Forest Reserve in the background. The author took the photo in June 2023. As
depicted, the area is covered primarily by Acacia woodlands. Mountain peaks in the Tarangire ecosystem are covered by Podocarpus and Olea forests (Prins 1987;
Kiffner et al., 2022a).
J. Raycraft

Trees, Forests and People 13 (2023) 100418
3
These include savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana), zebra (Equus
quagga), buffalo (Syncerus caffer), wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus),
impala (Aepyceros melampus), waterbuck (Kobus ellipsiprymnus), bush-
buck (Tragelaphus scriptus), Thomson’s gazelle (Eudorcas thomsonii),
fringe-eared oryx (Oryx beisa callotis), gerenuk (Litocranius walleri),
greater kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros), lesser kudu (Tragelaphus imbe-
rbis), eland (Tragelaphus oryx), dik-dik (Madoqua kirkii), warthogs
(Phacochoerus africanus), bush pigs (Potamochoerus larvatus), and a
complete large carnivore guild comprising lions (Panthera leo), spotted
hyenas (Crocuta crocuta), striped hyenas (Hyaena hyaena), leopards
(Panthera pardus), cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus raineyii), wild dogs (Lycaon
pictus), jackals (Lupulella mesomelas), civets (Civettictis civetta), large
spotted genets (Genetta maculata), and common genets (Genetta genetta)
(Kiffner et al., 2022). Seasonally, the landscape transforms with bimodal
rainfall patterns that vary between approximately 200 mm of annual
rainfall in the lowlands to above 650 mm in the forested highlands. The
central part of the ecosystem, for instance, has on average between 434
and 824 mm of annual rainfall (Kioko et al., 2022; Prins and Loth 1988).
From June-October, the landscape is dry and dusty, and wildlife stay
close to the Tarangire river inside Tarangire National Park, which pro-
vides one of the only permanent water sources year-round. From
November-December, the ecosystem receives a short rainfall followed
by a short dry period from January-February. After this, from March
until May, a long rainy season revitalizes the landscape, which turns
verdant with colour as water is more evenly distributed across the area.
Since national parks are unfenced in Tanzania, wildlife disperse outside
Tarangire National Park during the wet seasons in search of forage.
Areas adjacent to the park are categorized as village land and are
inhabited by local agropastoral communities. Human-wildlife in-
teractions are frequent in these areas, with negative repercussions for
both wildlife populations and human wellbeing (Hariohay and Røskaft
2015).
The present study was caried out in twelve administrative villages to
the north and east of Tarangire National Park: Makuyuni, Esilalei,
Oltukai, Olasiti, Mswakini Chini, Mswakini Juu, Naitolia, Lemooti,
Lengoolwa, Nafco, Lolkisale, and Oldonyo. Olasiti village is located in
Babati District (Manyara Region), and the rest of the villages are part of
Monduli District (Arusha Region). Oltukai and Esilalei are partner vil-
lages of Manyara Ranch (Fig. 2), a semi-community-based conservation
area managed through a conservation trust by the African Wildlife
Foundation in collaboration with Monduli District Government, Hon-
eyguide Foundation, and the two villages (Goldman 2011, 2020). Local
livestock-keepers are permitted to graze their livestock on the ranch
during the dry season but are restricted from accessing ranch pastures
during the wet season. Other resource uses like hunting, settlement, and
crop cultivation are prohibited. Mswakini Chini, Mswakini Juu, Naito-
lia, Lemooti, Lengoolwa, Nafco, Lolkisale, and Oldonyo are member
villages of Randilen Wildlife Management Area (WMA), and Olasiti
village is a member village of Burunge WMA. Wildlife Management
Areas are governed through Authorised Associations comprising village
representatives that make governance decisions in collaboration with
district government. Land use plans are determined by the Association
and involve the designation of some portions of village land as a reserve
area, and the enforcement of a multi-use management plan that supports
conservation and local livelihoods. Randilen WMA has a zoning plan
that includes a photographic tourism and wildlife reserve area, a mixed
livestock and photographic area, and areas designated for crop culti-
vation and human settlement. The twelve villages were selected because
they surround Manyara Ranch and Randilen WMA. Together with these
conservation areas, the study villages represent an interconnected
portion of the Tarangire ecosystem.
The study villages are inhabited primarily by Kisongo Maasai pas-
toralists and Arusha Maasai agropastoralists (Raycraft 2022a). The
Kisongo likely arrived in the area a few hundred years ago and continue
to manage pastures through a pastoral mode of production. The Arusha
moved into the area in the 1950s-1960s due to land scarcity on Mount
Fig. 2. – This map shows the central part of the Tarangire ecosystem, where the study was conducted. The gure was adapted and redrawn by the author based on
(Raycraft 2022b:59). Villages are represented on this map with names to signify their approximate locations, though they are actually administrative political units
with clearly dened boundaries.
J. Raycraft

Trees, Forests and People 13 (2023) 100418
4
Meru, with encouragement from colonial administrators, and later the
socialist government (Igoe 2010; Bluwstein 2017). Both groups speak
Maa, uphold an age-set system, practice a gender-based division of la-
bour, and depend on livestock and crop cultivation for livelihoods. Their
societies are interdigitated through shared participation in rituals and
intermarriage, though ethnic territoriality is still maintained across
sub-villages and villages (Raycraft 2022b). Cattle are central to the so-
cial and economic life of the Kisongo, though herders also keep goats
and sheep. The Arusha are also livestock keepers in this ethnographic
context, but consider themselves primarily cultivators (Spear 1997).
Both groups produce maize and beans, and the Arusha also grow a va-
riety of other crops including peas and sunowers. Makuyuni, Olasiti,
and Lolkisale also have town-like sub-villages with people of mixed
ethnicities, though the majority of people living across the study area are
Maasai.
Though the area is largely dominated by Acacia woodlands, the term
‘forest’ (Misitu in kiSwahili; Entim or Osero in Maa) is locally contentious
as it connotes regulations on land uses. Adjacent to the Saburi sub-
village of Makuyuni is the Esimangore Mountain Forest Reserve,
which is centrally managed by the Tanzania Forest Services Agency.
Some parts of Esimangore, on the other side of the mountain from
Makuyuni, are managed as a trophy hunting block. Lolkisale mountain is
covered by dense forest and is managed through the Lolkisale Village
Land Forest Reserve (Mwakalukwa et al., 2023).
Methods for data collection
This study involved ethnographic eld research across the twelve
study villages in the Tarangire ecosystem. The permit to conduct
research in Tanzania was issued by the Tanzania Commission for Science
and Technology (COSTECH) as part of the “Social landscapes of liveli-
hood in northern Tanzania” research project (Permit No. 2019–426-NA-
2019–299). Letters of support were also provided by Arusha and
Manyara regional governments, Monduli and Babati district govern-
ments, wards, and local villages. Ethical review for the conduct of
research with human subjects was carried out by McGill University in
2019 (REB File #: 479–0419) and the University of Lethbridge via the
University of Alberta in 2023 (Pro00130079). Data collection in
2019–2020 included 20 qualitative interviews with household heads in
each village (n =240; 50% men; 50% women). Household heads were
selected in a semi-random fashion on foot to ensure that interviewees
were selected from all sub-villages. Interviewees were asked to describe
their interactions with wildlife and which species were associated with
benets and costs. Questions were open-ended and respondents were
not prompted to answer in a particular way. Species that were identied
as particularly problematic were then included in a household survey
that was administered to a randomly selected sample (stratied random
sampling) of 1076 individuals across all twelve villages in 2020. To
account for gender bias, three categories of respondents were recruited
for participation: male household heads, female household heads, and
females in male-headed households. Detailed descriptions of inclusion
criteria and sampling frames are published elsewhere (Raycraft 2022a,
b). This paper presents descriptive results to a question on perceived
frequency of wildlife attacks on people by species over the past twelve
months. Previous quantitative studies effectively demonstrate correla-
tions between demographic variables and perceptions of conict with
wildlife (Koziarski et al., 2016; Bencin et al., 2016; Mkonyi et al., 2017b;
Mkonyi et al., 2017a). In this paper, response frequencies to the survey
item on perceived wildlife attacks are presented to triangulate and
contextualize the paper’s qualitative ndings, generated through
ethnography (July 2019-July 2020; June-July 2022; April-May 2023).
The majority of data presented in this paper were gathered through
participant observation of everyday live at the village level, in keeping
with the discipline of sociocultural anthropology. Ethnographic obser-
vations provide a nuanced account of people’s lived experiences of
sharing landscapes with wildlife that are otherwise difcult to quantify.
Results
Interview and survey results
A descriptive overview of survey respondent demographics (n =
1076) is provided here to contextualize the qualitative data presented in
the subsequent sections. Most respondents were Maasai, with 58%
identifying as Arusha and 32% self-identifying as Kisongo. A small mi-
nority were from other ethnic groups like Iraqw (2%), and Nyaturu
(2%), and fourteen other ethnic groups of 1% or less of the total sample.
About 41% of respondents were Korianga-aged (29–44), 31% were
Landiis-aged (45–55), 12% were Makaa-aged (56–70), 8% were Seuri-
aged (71–85), 7% were Nyangulu-aged (18–28), and 2% were Nyangusi-
aged (85+). The majority of survey respondents had primary level ed-
ucation (54%), and about 39% had no formal education. A small mi-
nority had attended secondary school (5%), and a couple respondents
had been to university (1%). Most of the respondents derived the bulk of
their income from livestock keeping and crop cultivation (83.6%).
During qualitative interviews across the twelve study villages (n =
240), people consistently reported elephants, hyenas, buffalo, lions, and
snakes, as signicant threats to human safety. This nding corroborates
the results of a previous study of local perceptions of wildlife (Bencin
et al., 2016). Interviewees volunteered these answers without specic
prompting about each species. Elephants were less worrying to people
living in Oltukai village and Lolkisale town, but were a concern in the
rest of the study villages. Women were especially fearful of elephants
and buffalo. Men expressed concern about snakes and large carnivores.
Lions in particular were considered especially dangerous. This gendered
nding aligns with recent regional literature. Kissui et al. (2022) note
that 98% of documented large carnivore attacks in the Tarangire
ecosystem are on men. Kissui et al. (2022) reason that this gender
discrepancy is due to the fact that men are more involved in herding and
reliatory killings of carnivores. Men also generally walk alone at night
more often than women. Numerous male interviewees explained that
snake bites occur regularly but are usually not lethal. Deaths, however,
do occur from black mambas (Dendroaspis polylepis), black necked spit-
ting cobras (Naja nigricollis), and Egyptian cobras (Naja haje), though
these incidents are uncommon (Branch 2014). Snake bites from a variety
of nonlethal snakes (e.g. ornate and house snakes) are routine parts of
everyday life, and were not considered particularly concerning to peo-
ple. A recent study of snakebites in Tanzania’s Maasailand found that
men aged 18–60 are more commonly bitten by snakes than women, as
men are usually responsible for herding cattle in remote areas in the dry
season (Francis et al., 2023). Complicating matters, access to anti-venom
medications and trained professionals for administering them are only
available at the Meserani Snake Park Clinic in Duka Bovu. Nonetheless,
my interviewees explained that snake bites were usually nonlethal. At-
tacks from elephants, hyenas, buffalo, and lions, however, were often
described as potentially deadly.
Based on people’s responses, elephant, lion, buffalo, snake, and
hyena were included as survey items to establish perceived frequencies
of attacks on people by species over a twelve-month period (2019–2020)
(Fig. 3). An ‘other’ category was also included in case there were other
problematic species that were not identied during interviews. Overall,
people reported that elephant attacks were the most frequent with 24%
reporting that elephants attacked very often over the past twelve months
followed by hyenas (22%), snakes (12%), buffalo (9%), lions (5%), and
other (2%). Notably, leopards were not raised explicitly during in-depth
interviews as dangerous to people, though they were noted on numerous
surveys in the ‘other’ category. Leopards are a major concern for live-
stock keepers living in the ve villages surrounding the highland forests
of Lolkisale mountain. In these villages, some survey respondents
explained that leopards sometimes attack children around dusk if they
are left unattended.
J. Raycraft

Trees, Forests and People 13 (2023) 100418
5
Elephants
In early 2020, I visited a middle-aged Arusha man at his homestead
in Makuyuni to interview him about his livelihood practices, his
thoughts on community-based conservation, and his views on wildlife.
When we commenced our interview, the focus of our conversation
immediately narrowed in scope to a traumatic incident that had
occurred two years prior, in that very same location. As detailed to me
by the man, he had been tending to the thorny acacia fence around his
homestead one evening before retiring to his quarters to sleep when a
massive elephant barrelled through the fence and attacked him. The
man guided me out to the spot where the incident had occurred and
described to me in frightening detail his experience of being unsus-
pectingly attacked by the largest land mammal on earth, in what he
thought was the security of his own home. In the man’s description, the
elephant had charged through his fence and knocked him to the ground
as it trumpeted loudly. In shock, and temporarily winded, the man was
unable to ee, and the elephant began stomping on his leg. Though it left
soon after, and the man survived, the elephant’s tramples had left the
man with a complex, compound fracture in his leg for which he was
unable to receive adequate medical care. As he led me around his
homestead recounting the events, he hobbled with a cane and a signif-
icant limp that he had been informed by a physician would likely be
permanent. The young man and his family had pled to the district
government for compensation for the incident, which had severely
hampered the man’s abilities to work his farms and provide for his
family. Two years later, however, they had still not been offered any
compensation due to bureaucratic inefciencies, limited government
funds, and challenges in verifying the exact nature of the event. During
our interview, the man explained that he had been left traumatized by
the incident, realizing that he and his family were not safe, even within
the connes of their own home. He also felt neglected by the govern-
ment and echoed a sentiment that was conveyed to me on many occa-
sions as I carried out my eldwork—that the central government cared
more about wildlife than it did about the wellbeing of rural
communities.
Though highly disturbing, the man’s lived experience of sharing a
landscape with a large mammal of conservation and tourism signi-
cance was far from anomalous. In fact, many of the incidents described
to me were much more severe. While carrying out eldwork in Lemooti
village in late 2019, numerous interviewees lamented that elephants
were so ubiquitous in their village that people were living in constant
fear of dangerous interactions. As described elsewhere, the perceived
impacts of elephants on crop production in Lemooti were so signicant
that many Kisongo Maasai pastoralists living there had largely aban-
doned farming and returned the land to pasture (Raycraft 2022b). While
the impacts on food production were certainly concerning, the threats to
safety were even more pressing. On one evening, while taking a
motorbike home in the village, a man encountered an elephant after
turning a bend. Startled, the elephant struck him off his bike and
trampled him to death. Though Tarangire National Park authorities later
visited the community to convey their condolences, and the government
did make a payment to the family to offset some of their economic
hardships, the human cost of living with elephants was severely
undervalued from the perspectives of community members. In this case,
it had cost a man his life, and the social ripples were felt throughout the
household that he had headed.
Further away from the forests of Lolkisale Mountain, in the villages
of Naitolia, Mswakini Chini, and Mswakini Juu, Arusha Maasai in-
terlocutors expressed anger about the constant threats of living in an
elephant dispersal area. People conveyed that as dusk fell upon their
villages, they felt insecure walking around outside their homes out of
fear of encountering elephants. Women described the dangers faced by
their children on a regular basis in the wet season on their walks to
school in the morning. Children often encountered large elephant herds
and were forced to wait for hours until the elephants left. Wright (2019)
refers to these types of experiences in Tanzania’s Maasailand as the
“precariousness of living with elephants.” During one interview with an
elder Arusha man at his home in Naitolia village, he showed us the
damage inicted by elephants the night prior—three trees that had
taken years to grow had been knocked down next to his house. He
pointed to the remnants of his sisal fence and shrugged his shoulders in
frustration. Sisal, used by Maasai communities to demarcate customary
tenure of homesteads, is particularly attractive to elephants as a source
of food. Ironically, the very plant used to create boundaries and keep
intruders out had attracted them to come in.
The problem was not specic to the villages of Mswakini and Naitolia
and in fact spanned all the study villages except Oltukai and Esilalei,
where Kisongo Maasai pastoralists reported fewer troublesome en-
counters with elephants in their everyday lives. The dispersal of ele-
phants outside Tarangire National Park in the wet season, particularly to
the northeast of the park via Randilen WMA, Manyara Ranch, and Esi-
mangore Forest Reserve makes these areas dangerous for people. When I
rst arrived in Makuyuni village in September 2019 to commence
Fig. 3. – This stacked bar chart displays perceptions of wildlife attack frequencies on humans by species over a twelve-month period in 2019–2020 based on a
household survey (n =1076) administered in 2020 across twelve villages in the Tarangire ecosystem. Respondents were selected through stratied random sampling.
J. Raycraft

Trees, Forests and People 13 (2023) 100418
6
eldwork, my eld assistant Edwin Maingo Ole was told by several boda
boda (motorbike taxi) drivers that they were unwilling to drive him to
his extended family’s homestead in Saburi sub-village because they were
too afraid of encountering elephants along the way. Later, in November
2019, while I helped facilitate a workshop on community-based con-
servation in Mto wa Mbu, Edwin was unable to leave his homestead in
the morning due to a nearby herd of elephants blocking the path to the
main road.
Despite the signicant threats that elephants pose to human security,
government support for local communities in dealing with the conict is
limited. Several interviewees across the study villages articulated the
common sentiment that human lives were not valued by the government
to the same extent as elephant lives. As one interviewee in Olasiti village
explained emphatically, “If someone is killed by an elephant, they will
send one vehicle with ofcials to pass along their condolences. If an
elephant is killed on community land, then they will send ten vehicles
and a helicopter!” This statement is, of course, an exaggeration, as
wildlife authorities in this area do not have funding for helicopters to
address human-wildlife conicts. But the statement nonetheless high-
lights the local belief that the central government values elephants over
people.
The strong government interest in protecting elephants is well
justied. Elephants are highly signicant sources of safari tourism rev-
enue and are coveted by organized poachers and wildlife trafckers for
their tusks, though recent policy reforms in China have resulted in a
decline in the Asian market for ivory. In the Tanzanian context,
increased political will for enforcement of ivory trafcking during
President Magufuli’s regime led to the arrests of key actors implicated in
the trade. Poaching declined across Tanzania as a result. Elephants are
also highly intelligent, social creatures with their own intrinsic right to
security. But from the perspectives of local agropastoral communities in
the Tarangire ecosystem, the protection of elephants has come at the
cost of selectively neglecting the safety concerns of local people. The
most promising steps to reduce the impacts of elephants on human se-
curity have been spearheaded by the local grassroots non-governmental
organization, Honeyguide. In partnership with Randilen WMA, Honey-
guide has helped supply Randilen’s member villages with high-
luminosity battery-powered ashlights, roman candles, and handheld
chilli bombs that are distributed to local villages via funding from
Randilen WMA’s community-based tourism revenue. Honeyguide-
supported antipoaching vehicles for the WMA are also repurposed as
defences against elephant crop-raiding in the wet season, providing
community members with an added sense of security in the harvest
season. Local community members very much appreciate these efforts
from Honeyguide and Randilen WMA to improve their wellbeing and
security. Monduli District game ofcers are also dedicated to the issue
and are well received by the communities for their efforts. District game
ofcers, however, are severely constrained by limited operational funds
making it challenging to address the issue on a consistent basis. Despite
these local efforts, community members on the whole feel underrepre-
sented by central government policies and formal state institutions for
managing wildlife.
Spotted hyenas
Aside from elephants, local agropastoralists must contend with
numerous large carnivores that share community land. In mid 2020,
while I was visiting Olasiti’s village ofce to meet with the village chair
and executive ofcer, representatives and staff from Tarangire National
Park and Burunge WMA showed up in their respective 4 ×4 vehicles.
Curious to know what was going on, I struck up a conversation with one
of the visitors, who solemnly explained that someone had just been
killed by a spotted hyena. The group was heading to the victim’s home to
offer condolences to the family. Edwin and I decided to join to pay our
respects and document the event. We followed the caravan of vehicles to
the homestead in Olasiti where we were greeted by the bereaved Arusha
Maasai family and an olaigwenani (Maasai traditional age set leader)
who had been entrusted to oversee the process of paying respects and
condolences. Together, we sat in a circle of about twenty of us. The
olaigwenani opened the meeting with a solemn introduction, followed by
individual respects from each person in the circle and a payment to the
olaigwenani who consolidated all the contributions and handed them to
the victim’s family in a symbolic gesture. The meeting ended soon after
and we asked the family if it would be appropriate for us to return at a
later date to discuss and document the incident. Despite their grief, the
family members were surprisingly grateful that researchers had
expressed interest in hearing their perspectives about the incident.
Edwin and I returned a week later, and began to unfold what had
happened: a six-year-old boy had been killed by a hyena just outside
their family homestead. As recounted by the mother, the boy had been
playing in the sand in the afternoon. He was within earshot but out of
her line of sight. The mother had been cleaning and doing household
chores in the yard when she heard her boy scream. Assuming he had
fallen into a hole, she ran over to her son and saw him on the ground
covered in blood. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a hyena appeared
and leapt at her. In her description, the hyena knew that someone would
be coming to investigate the scream and had hidden in wait for the
mother to come for her child. The woman fought with all her strength
and reached her arm out in an attempt to push the animal away. In the
process, the hyena bit off the last three ngers of her hand. She screamed
for help and fought desperately to save her child’s life, and within mi-
nutes her family members and neighbours arrived and chased off the
hyena. Unfortunately, it was too late, and the child succumbed to his
injuries.
The mother was rushed to the hospital in Mto wa Mbu for emergency
treatment. As we spoke to her following her discharge, she raised her
bandaged hand to show us her two remaining ngers. She explained that
there were no words that would be able to convey the feelings of pain
she was experiencing at the loss of her child. At one point during our
conversation, she was understandably overcome with emotions, as was
the rest of her family. The violent way the child had been killed within
her earshot left her wrestling with feelings of misplaced guilt and shame.
These emotional wounds are difcult to quantify through conservation
research. Once again, the concept of home—a place that connotes se-
curity and comfort across cultures —became the site of violence. On this
occasion, it had cost a young boy his life, and inicted emotional trauma
on his mother and her family.
Though the community initially assumed that the hyena had been
rabid, national park staff allegedly found and tested the animal after-
wards and concluded that it did not have rabies. Park staff were some-
what unsure as to why the hyena would attack a person in broad
daylight, though hyena attacks had been on a sharp rise in 2019–2020
when I conducted my doctoral eldwork (Kissui et al., 2022, 14). On one
occasion, when I was interviewing the management staff of Lake
Manyara National Park in 2020, the head ranger received a walkie-talkie
report that a person had just been attacked by a hyena in Karatu. When I
asked him about the incident, the ranger conceded that hyenas were
becoming a serious problem for people living adjacent to protected areas
and he was not sure why they were increasing their attack frequency on
people. While carrying out emplaced eldwork in Oltukai village in
2019, hyenas visited our boma nightly. In an attempt to document and
observe these dynamics up close, I camped in a y tent just outside the
livestock kraal. In Oltukai, there is no outside homestead fence to deter
predators, as local Kisongo Maasai feel that hyenas are more put off by
the aesthetic of Maasai huts. On the rst night at my post, a large spotted
hyena appeared at about 3am a few feet from my tent and began digging
to get into the livestock kraal. I yelled at it to go away and its snarl in
response was somewhat frightening, as I realized that the hyena could
have easily torn through the y cover and bitten me. People laughed at
rst when I told them the story the following day. They considered the
act of defending livestock from predators to be my rite of passage to
becoming mwanajami (a community member). However, elders later
J. Raycraft

Trees, Forests and People 13 (2023) 100418
7
advised me sternly to not lie out in the open at night because hyenas had
been known to attack people. On one occasion, a rabid hyena had even
broken down the door of someone’s hut and attacked a man in his sleep.
Lions
Lions are also problematic for local communities. When I carried out
my doctoral eldwork in 2019–2020, most interviewees respected the
threat that lions posed to safety, but were quick to point out that issues
with lions were nowhere near as frequent as they were with hyenas.
During interviews, people suggested that lions had learned to fear
people and would “lie down in the grass” if people approached to avoid
encounters altogether. These sentiments were mirrored in the survey
results, which suggested less frequencies of attacks on humans overall.
When I returned for follow-up eldwork in 2022 to provide feedback on
my ndings with local stakeholders, however, the narrative had
changed drastically. Earlier that year, in March, a lioness (named
“Namasa” by the communities) had attacked three people in Mswakini
Juu and the community swiftly killed it in response. Tensions over lions
escalated to a boil following an incident that occurred on Manyara
Ranch during my eldwork in June 2022. While bringing cattle to the
river to drink, a young herder was ambushed and killed by a lioness.
Uncharacteristically for lion attacks on people, the lioness ate the
herder. The event was possibly related to the severe and prolonged
drought that lasted the entirety of 2022, limiting available forage for
wild ungulates and thus affecting large carnivores in turn. But a lion
targeting a herder, rather than the cattle he was tending, was uncom-
mon. Some members of the local community assumed that the young
herder must have been cursed, considering that he was not only killed,
but eaten. My conversations with conservationists, however, revealed
that this lioness had gone ‘rogue’ and had begun to attack cattle and
herders alike. My interlocutors suggested that once a lioness had
“switched” to attacking people and livestock, it was very difcult to
change its behaviour and it either had to be put down or relocated.
From the perspectives of local Kisongo Maasai herders in Oltukai and
Esilalei, the incident was outrageous because the Maasai have been
banned from killing lions, a practice that has historically been a signif-
icant cultural rite of passage. Kisongo Maasai do not actually dislike
lions, though they despise hyenas. They in fact greatly respect lions as
semiotic reference points in their cultural lives (Goldman et al., 2010).
But as Kissui (2008) points out, when lions attack people or livestock in
Tanzania’s Maasailand, they are often disproportionately affected by
retaliatory killings as opposed to hyenas. One reason, as Kissui describes,
is that retaliatory killings of lions in effect kill ‘two birds with one stone,’
—Maasai herders leverage the material consequences of lion attacks as
justication for transgressing the prohibitions on their cultural rite of
passage. While hyenas have much larger impacts on the livestock
economy, they carry little to no cultural signicance (except amongst
the Laitayok Maasai section, which totemically identies with them) and
thus killing them does not generate any social capital within Maasai
society (Kissui et al., 2019). Another reason, raised by one of the
anonymous reviewers of this article, is that lions tend to defend their
kills, which makes them vulnerable to human spear attacks. By contrast,
hyenas usually ee when people arrive, and are quick to get out of spear
and arrow range.
Conicts between lions and Kisongo Maasai in Oltukai, Esilalei, and
Saburi are also symbolic of larger political tensions over conservation
dynamics (Goldman 2011, 2020). When local communities were
particularly unhappy with ranch governance in the early 2000s, for
instance, they killed lions with greater frequency to communicate their
discontent to authorities. As the dust settled with ranch politics and
everyday management settled into a herder friendly model, lion killings
largely subsided. When events like the lioness attack of 2022 occur, they
catalyse strong emotional responses from the communities, as they
dredge up past feelings of exclusion and neglect, and serve as a reminder
that local pastoralists often bear the costs of wildlife conservation, while
receiving few of the tangible benets. In this case, the communities of
Oltukai and Esilalei were enraged and a party of twenty warriors was
sent to retaliate. The ranch manager, a Maasai man himself, made a
valiant attempt to de-escalate the situation. He offered support to the
affected families and spoke earnestly about the importance of not killing
the lioness in response. The group of warriors initially implied that they
would not strike back after visiting the location where the rangers were
stationed. In reality, they had tricked the manager by creating a diver-
sion. Simultaneously, the communities sent a group of twenty warriors
to kill two lions in a different location. The irony was that the warriors
killed two male lions that were not responsible for the event in the rst
place. The reason, however, was that the large maned males carried
more cultural signicance and generated more social capital for the
young warriors (Kissui 2008). Realizing at that point that the lion pride
was under serious threat, the ranch manager in collaboration with
Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority (TAWA) staff and members of
the Tarangire Lion Project acted swiftly to relocate the responsible
lioness and her cubs to Burigi-Chato-National Park in northwestern
Tanzania, near the Rwandan border. Relocating the lions was a major
logistical challenge that saw ranch staff catch two cubs and their
mothers at midnight with tranquilizers, load them into crates in the
backs of pickup trucks, and send them on their way the following day.
Managing the emotional response from the communities, however, was
likely the most challenging part. People were angry and upset and these
feelings were only exacerbated by the government response. As several
community members once again lamented to me: “when the herder was
killed, two vehicles came. But when the lions were killed in response,
fteen showed up.”
Buffalo
In December 2022, at the height of the extreme drought, a deaf child
at Lowassa Secondary school in Saburi sub-village of Makuyuni was
charged by a lone male buffalo just outside the school grounds and
severely injured. Male buffalo often leave their herds as they mature and
come to live solitary lives. This particular male was notably aggressive.
Following the attack, the child was taken to Arusha Hospital and sur-
vived without lasting injuries. Other children at the school, which sup-
ports students with special needs, were extremely frightened by the
event and fearful of going outside immediately afterwards. TAWA of-
cers responded quite swiftly to the incident and came to chase away the
buffalo, rather than put it down. The buffalo, however, held its ground
and attacked one of the TAWA rangers, piercing the man’s neck with its
horn. The ofcer was immediately taken to hospital with critical in-
juries, but survived. The second attack heightened the students’ fears
about the dangerous buffalo that lurked somewhere near their school.
This buffalo, they began to think, was so strong that even well-armed
government rangers could not stop it from injuring people. The
following day, TAWA rangers exed their muscles by returning and
killing the buffalo. By that point, the problem animal had still not left the
area, and thus posed an ongoing threat to local people. As a gesture of
good faith to try to placate the worried children, TAWA rangers
butchered the buffalo carcass and fed the meat to the children at the
school—a material perk for hungry children, but more importantly, a
symbolic gesture to convey to the children that TAWA had eliminated
the threat.
The circumstances around the buffalo attacks were not unique, but
there were a few context-specic factors that might be of signicance.
The initial attack had occurred during the extreme drought, during a
time when even the highlands of Esimangore forest had limited sources
of water. It is possible that the buffalo had wandered down from the
forest into the community in search of grass and water, though Manyara
Ranch has resident buffalo as well. Generally speaking, buffalo attacks
on the open plains are infrequent because people and buffalo can ex-
change eye contact and keep their distance. However, in this case, it is
possible that drought stressed the status quo.
J. Raycraft

Trees, Forests and People 13 (2023) 100418
8
Drought also has the added consequence of forcing local herders
higher up into the forest highlands of Esimangore, where they often
graze livestock in the severe dry season. However, local herders are wary
of trekking up into the mountains because lone male buffalo in the
forests are extremely dangerous. Several Kisongo Maasai pastoralists
explained to me that lone males in the mountain forests will charge at
herders through the bush, potentially causing serious injury or death. In
late 2022, a local herder from Saburi ventured up into the forest high-
lands in search of dry season pasture and was charged by a buffalo. The
young herder was terried but managed to escape without serious in-
juries, as it was only a glancing blow. He was taken to hospital where
doctors gave him a clean bill of health, but he was notably shaken by the
event and unwilling to return to the forest for some time.
The fear of buffalo in the forests has become totemically integrated
into everyday discourse since it is such a ubiquitous threat. As a measure
of a warrior’s physical strength, people often remark: “this man could
ght a buffalo.” When people are less convinced by someone’s strength,
it is framed as more of a question: “Could you not ght a buffalo?” Both
sentiments are, of course, jokes as no one is actually expected to ght a
buffalo. They are, however, idiomatic references to a very real danger
that bears on people’s everyday lives. In cases where emotions might
otherwise run high, the phrase is sometimes mobilized to playfully make
light of a challenging situation. This was the case in early 2020 when I
was carrying out eldwork in Oldonyo village. As I sat with the village
chair, an Arusha woman came into the ofce and explained exasperat-
edly that there was a buffalo in her farm. The buffalo had wandered
down from the highland forests of Lolkisale mountain and was grazing
on her crops. In response, the village chair offered up with a half-smile:
“Okay, can you go push it out for us while we nish talking?” The
woman began to laugh, and I could see the worries she carried with her
into the ofce begin to melt away. The chair’s joke had signalled to the
woman that she need not worry and that things were not as grave as she
was fearing. While it was possible in this case for the village chair to
make light of the threat of a buffalo in the lowlands adjacent to Lolkisale
Mountain, the prospect of a lone buffalo in the highland forests is no
laughing matter. This became abundantly clear to Edwin and I while we
carried out eldwork in Lolkisale village on my birthday. I had decided
that to celebrate I wanted to climb Lolkisale mountain, which over-
looked the villages, and Edwin was happy to accompany me. But in
starting our ascent, several villagers approached us and cautioned that
our plan was very dangerous due to buffalo on the mountain. Perhaps
overcondent, I did not pay them much heed until about an hour into
our trek up through the dense forest cover, did we come across fresh
buffalo droppings. The snap of a twig about a stone’s throw from us was
enough to seriously worry Edwin and instill in me a caution that I
perhaps should have had from the outset. As we continued on with
greater care, Edwin told me a story of his rite of passage experience
when he and a group of ilmurran had ventured into the forest in search of
a lion. When they arrived in the forest, however, they were met by an
angry buffalo, which, in Edwin’s description, pierced his brother’s lower
gut so severely that his intestines were hanging out of his body while
they carried him back to the village. Fortunately, they were able to rush
the young man to the hospital, and he survived. I could tell from the
manner in which Edwin told the story that he was genuinely traumatized
from this experience. Buffalo in the mountain forests are certainly to be
heeded, as visibility is obscured by trees and buffalo can attack through
the bush with little notice.
Discussion and conclusion
Living with the “big four”
The imperative to promote ecological connectivity outside protected
areas poses signicant conservation management challenges as
dispersing wildlife and human communities come into contact with each
other. In the Tarangire ecosystem of northern Tanzania, seasonal
patterns of wildlife movement outside Tarangire National Park into
adjacent villages engender a range of economic costs for local agro-
pastoral communities in the forms of crop raiding, livestock depreda-
tion, and damage to property. While these socioeconomic impacts of
human-wildlife conict are well-established (Mkonyi et al., 2017a),
the effects of wildlife on people’s lived experiences of physical safety
have thus far been poorly documented. Findings from this
mixed-methods ethnographic study reveal that local Maasai (Kisongo
and Arusha) consider elephants, spotted hyenas, buffalo, and lions to be
particularly dangerous animals to share landscapes with. These large
mammal species severely injure and kill people on a regular basis,
though incidents are underreported by ofcial outlets. While venomous
snakes and leopards also attack humans in this area with regularity,
local agropastoralists consider them less concerning than the “big four”
mentioned earlier in terms of their overall threats to human security.
The dangers of living with wildlife merit further attention by con-
servationists. Threats to physical safety are human security concerns as
people ought to have the right to feel safe in their own homes and
communities. Thus, there is a signicant social justice issue at stake in
northern Tanzania that is currently being inadequately addressed by
conservationists and government policy makers. Wildlife attacks on
humans are associated with surface-level tangible costs in the forms of
injuries and deaths, and also produce a range of hidden costs (Mayberry
et al., 2017; Barua et al., 2013). An anthropological approach to
research reveals that such incidents bring about feelings of fear, grief,
anger, stress, and sadness. Wildlife attacks on people inict deep psy-
chological wounds with lasting traumatic aftereffects. These costs of
wildlife conservation initiatives are difcult to quantify through
ecological approaches to wildlife-related research, suggesting that
greater attentiveness to the human dimensions of wildlife management
is needed in this ethnographic context.
Implications for wildlife management
The social implications of wildlife attacks on people are signicant
from an equity perspective, but also in terms of environmental sus-
tainability. At stake from a conservation standpoint is the long-term
viability of wildlife management initiatives that prioritize dispersals of
wildlife onto human-dominated landscapes outside protected areas. A
growing body of research shows that human-wildlife coexistence on
shared landscapes is largely dependent on the question of whether
people want to live alongside wildlife (Martin and Cole Burton 2022;
Exp´
osito-Granados et al., 2019; Inskip et al., 2016). That is to say, if
people are tolerant of the costs of sharing landscapes with wildlife, then
large mammal populations are much more likely to persist outside
protected areas (Dorresteijn et al., 2014). Frequent and often-lethal
wildlife attacks on people in the Tarangire ecosystem have made peo-
ple feel resentful towards wildlife, sentiments which could affect their
willingness to support wildlife management initiatives in the future.
These feelings are compounded by a conservation policy landscape that
generally prioritizes the generation of tourism revenue for central cof-
fers through state-private partnerships and foreign investments over the
wellbeing and livelihood security of local communities (Nelson et al.,
2007; Brockington 2008; Gardner 2016). Wildlife attacks are interpreted
by local agropastoralists as part of the broader institutional apparatus of
state governance that maximizes central benets while distributing the
brunt of conservation costs to local communities. Community-based
conservation has thus far produced mixed results in offsetting some of
these costs of wildlife at the local level, with the most promising
example being Randilen WMA. With support from the Honeyguide
Foundation, Randilen WMA has garnered local support for conservation
by redistributing the benets of wildlife management initiatives to its
member villages (Raycraft 2022a). These developments are a step in the
right direction, but greater capacity for livelihood-orientated models of
community-based conservation are needed to ensure that people
continue to look past the threats that wildlife pose to human security.
J. Raycraft

Trees, Forests and People 13 (2023) 100418
9
Importantly, documentation of wildlife attacks on people in the
Tarangire ecosystem should not be taken as evidence in support of the
claim that humans and wildlife cannot coexist in this region. Humans
have coexisted with wildlife in East Africa for hundreds of thousands of
years, albeit with appropriate levels of conict to maintain ecological
niches as necessary. The ethnographic ndings presented in this paper
should not be appropriated by government ofcials and conservationists
to justify further displacements of people from wildlife-rich areas in
northern Tanzania. I argue here that such an interpretation of these
ndings would be a gross misrepresentation of a textured ethnographic
reality. Local agropastoralists are remarkably tolerant of living with
large mammals provided that their livelihoods are secure, they are
treated with respect by governing authorities, and their dignity and right
to a good life are not considered by conservationists to be less important
than the preservation of wildlife populations. These asks put forth by
local people are modest in comparison to the benets generated by the
central government through wildlife-related tourism. As things
currently stand, however, local agropastoralists in the Tarangire
ecosystem (outside Randilen WMA) are largely being forced to deal with
the costs of living with wildlife while receiving few of the benets, and
this is a major issue for both equity and sustainability reasons.
Though this paper has highlighted several incidents of wildlife at-
tacks on people, it is important to mention that wildlife generally do not
attack people without provocation. The vast majority of lion attacks on
humans in the Tarangire ecosystem have historically occurred in the
context of human attempts to kill lions, either as a rite of passage, or in
retaliatory response to livestock depredation events (Kissui et al., 2022).
Lion attacks generally occur more in areas with fewer sources of prey
other than bushpigs and increase around harvest season (Packer et al.,
2005). Hyena attacks seem to be a different story. A recent study found
that 31% of people who were attacked by hyenas in the Tarangire
ecosystem were either in their home or walking at night (Kissui et al.,
2022). Thus, they did not occur in the context of attempted retaliatory
killings and could warrant further attention from wildlife authorities.
Furthermore, in the context of elephant crop-raiding, the aggressive
and noisy tactics used by farmers to defend their crops are meant to
aggravate and disturb elephants with the hope of motivating them to
leave. A recent study has found that elephants in the Tarangire
ecosystem react signicantly more aggressively to audio recordings of
people than they do to cattle or wildlife, suggesting that humans have a
signicant role to play in expressions of elephant aggression (Kioko
et al., 2022). Elephants are highly intelligent animals with excellent
memory, and they learn to associate aggressive behaviour with humans
in general, in turn responding violently to encounters with people to
reduce perceived threats. The fact that people are often involved in
provoking wildlife suggests that a nuanced perspective on
human-wildlife conict is necessary in this context. While the incidents
of wildlife attacks on humans I have foregrounded in this paper are
tragic, they are likely symptomatic of multi-scalar sociopolitical
dynamics.
It is obvious that there is an issue at stake in this social-ecological
context that is undermining the viability of human-wildlife coexis-
tence. At the same time, painting wildlife attacks on people exclusively
in terms of human rights glazes over the environmental complexities
that make this scenario challenging to address from a conservation
perspective. Land use changes around Tarangire National Park have
fragmented crucial wildlife habitat and reduced ecological connectivity
outside the park. These patterns of enclosure have deeply embedded
political and economic roots that stretch back historically to the colonial
and socialist periods. The entrenched nature of fragmentation in the
Tarangire ecosystem, as well as the political assemblage of stakeholders
implicated in the governance of resources in the area have created a
complicated political-ecological arena that frames interactions between
people and wildlife outside Tarangire National Park. The notion that
wildlife must be managed to reduce impacts on human wellbeing is a
somewhat misguided anthropocentric premise (cf. Washington et al.,
2021) as wildlife dynamics are governed naturally by ecological prin-
ciples. Wildlife management is at its core an issue of social and political
institutions, which should ensure that human society is managed in an
effective and sustainable way.
Existing literature on human-wildlife coexistence offers some ideas
for the way forward. Carter and Linnell (2016) present a particularly
useful denition of coexistence in this regard. In their description,
coexistence constitutes a dynamic yet sustainable state of co-adaptation
that enables wildlife and people to share landscapes through
well-tailored institutions for managing human-wildlife interactions. To
foster coexistence, human-wildlife management should allow wildlife
populations to thrive, while simultaneously respecting the wellbeing of
people and cultivating tolerance towards wildlife. Building from this
denition, it would seem based on the ethnographic data presented in
this paper that governance institutions are currently ineffective for
managing human-wildlife interactions in areas outside Tarangire Na-
tional Park. Targeted efforts to streamline land use planning and address
the safety concerns of local agropastoral communities will likely have
dual benets for wildlife populations and human wellbeing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The author declares that he has no known competing nancial in-
terests or personal relationships that could have appeared to inuence
the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
The data that has been used is condential.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Edwin Maingo Ole for his eld assistance
during data collection. Research was made possible by a Research
Afliate Fund Grant from the Prentice Institute for Global Population
and Economy at the University of Lethbridge (2023), a Vanier Canada
Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada (SSHRC) (2018–2021), a eldwork stipend from the
Institutional Canopy of Conservation SSHRC-International Development
Research Centre (IDRC) project (2019–2020), a Salisbury Award from
the Canadian Anthropology Society (2019–2020), a Field Research
Award from the McGill Institute for the Study of International Devel-
opment (2019–2020), and a Schull-Yang International Experience
Award (2019–2020). Ethical reviews for conduct of research with
human subjects were provided by McGill University (REB File #: 479-
0419) and the University of Lethbridge via the University of Alberta
(Pro00130079), and clearance to carry out research in Tanzania was
issued by the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology
(COSTECH) (Permit No. 2019-426-NA-2019-299). An earlier version of
this paper was presented at the Canadian Association of African Studies
(CAAS) Annual Meeting at York University on May 31, 2023 as part of
the panel “Decolonizing Conservation: African Aspirations and Indigenous
Visions of Sustainable Futures.” The author is grateful to the panel par-
ticipants and members of the ICAN research team for their support and
feedback on earlier iterations of the manuscript. The author is especially
grateful to the village communities that hosted and supported the
research.
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