Impacts of wild animals to communities around protected areas: a case study of Maasai Mara Game-Reserve Narok county Kenya.
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Date
2012-10
Authors
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Publisher
Kampala international University, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Abstract
Wild animals in protected areas can have serious concerns to the livelihoods of communities living in and around protected areas. The research investigated the impacts of the wild animals on communities around Maasai Mara game reserve. The wild animals and the types of destruction they cause, people’s attitudes towards wildlife conservation and their response towards the negative impacts from wild animals were investigated. Several techniques of data collection were used to gather the information for this study among which included interviews, observation and questionnaires, secondary data sources were used, various literatures that dealt with the topic, books, journals, reports and any un published, they were of great importance to the researcher since they provided relevant information.
The findings reveal that dominant wild animals were elephants, lions, leopards, wild beast and hyenas among others. These wild animals have various impacts to the community livelihoods. These included attacking and killing of livestock and people, destruction of agricultural land, crops and fences, competing for fodder with livestock hence overgrazing and spread of wildlife diseases to livestock and humans. However the community derives some positive impacts from these animals, for instance; wild meat and sport hunting, their skins are used for making whips, community were compensated whenever their livestock are attacked by the wild animals such as lions.
It was also revealed that a large number of communities preferred the game reserve to be turned into a grazing land; this is because of their large heads of cattle which lacks adequate grazing land because of high population growth rate which has led to over fragmentation of grazing land. In this case therefore the communities have negative attitudes towards wildlife conservation since they all compete for available resources. It is recommended that the concerned stakeholders should implement the following recommendations: bottom-up approach of management, community sensitization, compensation, revising the policies, controlling population growth rate, putting up buffer zones.
Description
A Research Dissertation Submitted to the Collage of Applied Sciences and Technology, Department of Environment Management in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Award of Bachelor of Science with Environmental Management
Keywords
Wild animals, Communities, Maasai Mara Game-Reserve Narok county, Kenya