Raising Game, Kenyan Saves Range

ATHI RIVER, Kenya — While growing up on a cattle ranch in Kenya's Rift Valley, David Hopcraft watched the vegetation on the rangeland disintegrate. He still remembers what his great-aunt told him after the first dust storm ever to hit the area.

She spoke of riding horses across the same land 25 years earlier. The grass was up to the horse's belly.

"Everybody said it was just overgrazing, and I accepted that explanation," Hopcraft recalls now.

Hopcraft has spent his adult life searching for a more complete answer to the encroaching desertification that, according to U.N. figures, threatens 90 percent of the world's rangelands. The most important clue was there all along: wildlife.

Where cattle had replaced wildlife, Hopcraft found, the land was devastated. But where wildlife remained, grasslands stayed thick and fertile.

So now, instead of driving off wildlife to raise cattle, as his father and grandfather did, Hopcraft protects his land by letting wild game run free. At the same time, he is the only rancher in Kenya - and probably all of Africa - who slaughters and sells wild game as food.

Because of Hopcraft, Nairobi's restaurants now offer smoked impala, emince of gazelle, grilled wildebeest and brochette of eland. Kenyans, who traditionally eat beef or goat meat, now eat much of the 45 tons of game meat Hopcraft sells every year.

'AFRICAN VENISON'

"African venison" - game meat - has only 1 percent fat, versus 20 percent for cattle. Game meat has none of the harmful saturated fats, antibiotics and hormones of beef. And Hopcraft has been able to kill up to 40 percent of the game on his land every year without reducing herd size, because the animals breed well when left alone in their natural environment.

His land, rather than being degraded by cattle, has actually prospered with wildlife left in its natural setting. Wild animals eat grasses and shrubs evenly, while cattle devastate preferred grasses.

Cows suck rangeland dry by drinking 10 to 15 gallons of water a day. African game animals need little or no water. Cows damage the land through heavy tracking, while wild game produces no serious tracking.

Thus, Hopcraft believes he has found a unique solution to two of Africa's chronic problems - land degradation and lack of a cheap, benign food source

from rangeland.