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.
Vehrs et al. (Wed,) studied this question.