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
The framing omits the role of colonial land grabs in severing indigenous pastoralist practices that historically regulated hyena populations; the erasure of Maasai and other pastoralist communities’ ecological knowledge; the impact of neoliberal conservation models (e.g., fenced conservancies) on predator mobility; and the historical parallels with other predator declines (e.g., wolves in North America) due to agricultural expansion and state-led eradication campaigns.
Medium structural omission detected in mainstream coverage.
The narrative is produced by a Finnish academic institution (University of Helsinki) and disseminated via Phys.org, a platform aligned with Western scientific institutions, reinforcing a top-down conservation paradigm. The framing serves conservation NGOs and state agencies by centering ‘tolerance’ as a behavioral metric, thereby obscuring their own roles in displacing indigenous pastoralists and fragmenting ecosystems. Power structures prioritize Western ecological models over indigenous land management practices, which have sustained predator populations for millennia.
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.