How colonial land regimes and urban sprawl disrupt predator coexistence: Kenya’s hyenas reveal structural tolerance gaps
Original framing: “Why some predators thrive near people: A Kenya hyena study highlights tolerance” — Phys.org
Maasai and other pastoralist communities are systematically excluded from conservation policy-making, despite their proven success in coexisting with hyenas. Their knowledge is often co-opted by NGOs (e.g., ‘indigenous knowledge’ workshops) without compensation or land rights recognition. The study’s focus on ‘tolerance’ as a behavioral metric ignores the structural violence of land dispossession, which forces communities into unsustainable livelihoods that escalate conflict with predators.
The Kenya hyena study inadvertently reveals how colonial land regimes and neoliberal conservation have weaponized ‘tolerance’ as a metric of human-wildlife coexistence, while systematically dismantling the indigenous systems that made such coexistence possible.
Maasai pastoralists, whose cosmology and land practices sustained hyena populations for centuries, are now framed as ‘problems’ to be managed by Western conservation science—a reversal of historical power that echoes the Swynnerton Plan’s displacement of indigenous communities. The study’s focus on individual attitudes obscures the structural incentives (e.g., fenced conservancies, subsidized agriculture) that force predators and people into conflict, a pattern repeated across Africa, Asia, and the Americas where colonial land policies severed ecological reciprocity. True systemic solutions must restore indigenous land rights, redesign agricultural landscapes to mimic natural predator-prey dynamics, and center marginalized voices in conservation governance. Without this, ‘coexistence’ will remain a privilege of the powerful, while predators—and the cultures that protect them—continue to vanish.