Clarifying competition: the case of wildlife and pastoral livestock in East Africa

Abstract

Contentious debates surrounding the relationship between peoples' livelihoods and protected areas in East Africa have largely revolved around claims and counter-claims about the level of competition between pastoral livestock and wildlife. Habitat and dietary overlap are often cited as the primary mechanism by which competition occurs with both overlap and lack of overlap (displacement) used as evidence of competition. Despite the importance of this issue for the economic and environmental futures of the region, there has been little scientific progress for understanding the nature of livestock-wildlife competition in pastoral landscapes. This article seeks to add conceptual clarity to this debate by focusing attention on exploitation competition in ways that are relevant to dryland East Africa. The article begins by briefly reviewing the changing understandings of the concept of competition in ecology. Requirements of competition, as defined in the literature, are then related to the ecological characteristics of East African drylands. By demonstrating that competition necessarily occurs through vegetative responses, we argue that there is the need to clarify competition by differentiating between 'proximate competition' and competition that is mediated by vegetation change across seasons. The article concludes by outlining the implications of these clarifications for the management and study of livestock-wildlife interactions.

Elephants over the Cliff: Explaining Wildlife Killings in Tanzania

“…Human-wildlife conflicts are often said to be caused by a growth in human numbers, leading to competition with wildlife for food, water and space (Mwamfupe, 1998;Hoare and du Toit, 1999;Siex and Struhsaker, 1999;Hoare, 1999;Naughton-Treves et al, 1999;Smith and Kasiki, 2000;Osborn and Hill, 2005;Sitati et al, 2005;Karimi, 2009;Butt and Turner, 2012;Reid, 2012). In cases where elephants cause problems for communities, human population growth is repeatedly cited as an explanatory factor.…”

Analysis of the Spatial Relationship between Cattle and Wild Ungulates across Different Land-Use Systems in a Tropical Savanna Landscape

“…Pasture resource availability is a requisite conditional requirement for interspecific competition to occur between sympatric populations [14]; wild ungulates have previously employed spatial partitioning to counter the competitive effects from cattle [28]. And cattle therefore are a possible cause of the observed spatial relationships.…”

“…Habitat sharing between domestic and wild ungulates may result in different kinds of ecological interactions between these two herbivore guilds, including competition [14][15][16], facilitation [15,17], and transmission of diseases and parasites [18,19]. However, the intensity of these interactions may vary depending on various factors, for instance, the digestive system and mouth morphology [20,21], body size and feeding habits of the wild ungulates involved, animal type and intensity [22], season (dry or wet), and land-use type where domestic and wild herbivores cooccur [15,23,24].…”

Herders and herdsmen: The remaking of pastoral livelihoods in Laikipia, Kenya

“…Considerations over whether pastoralism is compatible with conservation are not new, particularly in East Africa where pastoralists have long coexisted with wildlife (Homewood and Rodgers 1984;Prins 1992;Reid et al 2009;Butt and Turner 2012;Homewood et al 2012). Most scholars contend that mobile pastoralism is an efficient and productive means of managing favourable ecological conditions in drylands (Davies 2008) and that pastoralism is not necessarily detrimental to wildlife conservation goals, but rather an important component of rangeland ecology in areas where wildlife reside (Fratkin 1997).…”