Belling the Cats   The Quest to Study and Stop Africa’s Worst Man-eating Lions  Copyright Robert R. Frump November 1, 2006                                  Dark, Dark Eyes. In Rufiji, Tanzania, in the south of the Great Selous Game Reserve, where man-eating behavior among African lions may be the worst in the world, the American trapper Dairen Simpson circled a very dangerous 150-pound spotted hyena snagged by her hind leg as dawn broke on a September morning in 2006. This was not what he wanted and all of us in the media “chase car” knew that.  Pragmatic, we also realized this was at least something for us news-types.  Now we had the opportunity to see whether Simpson was for real.  I was in the “real” camp.  Not everyone was.   Africa is a wonder to behold, but to paraphrase the old saying about poker, if you’ve been in Africa for 20 days and you don’t know who the chump is, you’re the chump.  It was day 18 and counting for our little expedition and there were times when Simpson seemed larger than life – an American frontier figure revived from the 19th Century and turned loose on the plains of Africa – and there were times he perhaps was a little too good to be true.  Then again, when you watched him out there, circling that hyena like a wrestler, looking for an opening, inches away from jaws that had a bite force equal to that of a Great White Shark, knowing that he was about to try to take her down, essentially barehanded as a cowboy might a rodeo dawgie, he seemed the real deal.  A trusted friend in South Africa – a veteran field zoologist and lion man -- introduced me to him and described him with awe as “the closest thing to Davy Crockett you will see in the 21st Century.”   From what I had seen, that seemed pretty close.   Simpson was very tired, but very real.   Certainly, his mission was earnest.  This was classic lion country and Simpson, said to be one of the best trappers in the world, was after the big cats, the “big dumb blonds” of the savannahs as he put it.  He earnestly wanted to collar them with GPS trackers – to bell the cats, so to speak.   In Aesop’s Fable, “Belling the Cat,” the young mouse suggests to his colony that placing a bell about the neck of the cat would rid the mouse village of the cat’s murderous sneak attacks.  The mice would know the cat’s movements and thus be warned.  Everyone applauds, but no one well step forward to perform the deed.  The old wise mouse then sagely intones the moral:  “It is easy to propose impossible solutions.” Here there were no shortages of volunteers to bell the cats.  No one viewed the job as impossible.   One way or the other, traps or darts or both, we would get those collars on those cats.  Western technology and African bush skills would triumph. Then scientists could track the movements and habits of the big cats and hoped they could get a better handle on the cycles of lion attacks that have plagued the villagers here.   Both villagers and lions would be saved. It was important work; we all thought that.  The man-eating behavior had tripled here since 1990.   More than 800 people had been attacked by lions, more than 500 of them killed and most then eaten. Truly, this was a human horror story -- the unintended consequences of modern conservation policy.   The famous Man-eaters of Tsavo a century ago killed only 130 at the maximum.  The “All-Africa” record of about 1,500 dead was established in the 1940’s.  Now, even that ghastly record seemed posed to fall.   Man-eating behavior was actually increasing in the 21st Century. People were being snatched from their front porches in broad daylight in Lindi Region to the south.  In Rufiji District, farmers on night watch as “human scarecrows” in the fields found themselves lion fodder.   Lest this be lost on the West, two scientists recently had noted, “Lions pull people of bed, attack nursing mothers and catch children playing outside.”  So Simpson wanted to trap lions badly, as did we all, but the smart hyenas often beat the lions to the bait and now the trapper was in a quandary.   Normally, one would dart a wild animal caught in a snare and release it with little risk.  But he could not dart the hyena and still have enough tranquilizer left to dart lions.  He had two choices:  kill the hyena, or take her down physically and release her.  Killing was not in his playbook anymore.  He is a humane trapper.  So now this meant wrestling the animal down.  Literally pinning her to the ground, holding her and releasing her, essentially with his bare hands and a long stick or two and a noose. I was with a German documentary crew from the cultural channel Arte about 60 yards away from Simpson.  We the media had for days served as a Greek chorus that followed Simpson about, nodding at his words, repeating them, understanding them, we thought, and then speaking to the audience of ourselves as to what we really believed was going on as Simpson stalked the African bush.   Now, crowded inside the relative safety of a Toyota Land Cruiser, which had a leaf spring suspension that ground our molars to dust on these rough roads, we finally got to see Simpson in action.   The video nature doc crew would have a “good visual.”  They were a class act.  Gentle umlauts and guttural whispers filled the interior of the Toyota as Sascha, the cinematographer who looked like Father Christmas, studiously squinted through his big Panasonic HD camera with the Leica lens. “Baby,” he called it and he had cradled it – guarded it with his body -- as the Toyota lurched through ditches, furrows, potholes, dry riverbeds and fields, and launched us skyward, heads banged hard to the roof and sideward to the doors. Harunnah Lyima, my young and gifted guide, was in a nearby Land Rover Defender with Dennis Ikanda, a Tanzanian scientist and ever-so-serious leader of our expedition.  The Defender had coil springs – not the leaf springs of the Toyota – and its buttery ride ate up potholes the way a ’57 Caddie handles tar strips on a hot summer day.    That was one of my first lessons from Harrunah.   You could say he was an intellectual, and you would be correct and still mis-represent him.  He was a degreed zoologist but that bonafide had grown from an innate street smart, bush smart intelligence all its own.   That and great English allowed him to bridge cultures.  It allowed Germans and Rufiji villagers to understand one another in the dust of the dry season here in Southern Tanzania – the “Southern Circuit,” as the tourist board billed it.   This was the stepsister of the country’s park system, grand, but upstaged by the grander Serengeti, the lush Ngorongoro Crater and the majestic Kilimanjaro in the north.   Harunnah, it seemed, was able to channel all cultures, and gave good advice on matters from worldviews to wheels. “Always go with the coil springs, Bob,” he had said.  “You will see how the Defender rides.  Watch it.  Dennis really tears with it, man, he tears.   But he does not feel it the way you do in the Toyota.  You should ride with him.” Ten minutes earlier, as Simpson departed for the hyena, I had thought, forget the coil springs; just let me inside the landie.     I had wished that I were a fly on the wall in there, fluent in Swahili and clued in as to how the Africans really viewed this scene.   Ikanda was a deep file.  His skepticism about Simpson was not flagrant, but neither was it hidden.   I’d hoped to tap into those thoughts a bit more.  While Ikanda, the field biologist, was observing the wildlife, I was observing him.  The grand scene here that we all observed was a small, beautiful stretch of savannah with classic flat-topped acacia trees outlined against an orange ball of sunrise. The raking light of the still-low sun coppered us all in a flattering light as we sat in the enter of this small flat area amid the vast, beautiful, primitive woodland of the Selous Game Reserve.  Sascha’s fine eye had soaked it all in through the big Leica lens on “Baby,” panning about in a 360 sweep.  Here is what it saw: Tall grass – lion grass -- bordered a swampy watering ground that gave way to brush, bushes, trees and good grazing ground for impala, zebra, buffalo.   Magnificent trees, white trunks lit by that slanted sun, loci of leaves perfect against the sky caught for an eternal moment in that painted, textured light. The beauty of the land made it both hard to remember one moment and impossible to forget the next that all of us were in danger outside our vehicles.  Inside them too, for that matter, given the habits of some of the cats who seemed to have boundary issues. Tracks of game, of cats, of hyena, of impala, of buffalo, were everywhere.  This was deep bush; wild bush. Essentially we were at ground zero of the worst man-eating lion territory in the world.   All of us were drawn to it; Simpson lived for it.    He spoke in a drawl born of the rural parts of California where cowboys, cattle ranches, horse farms and wild beaches converge.   Linguistically, it seemed as if one part cowboy and a dash of beach boy had been frapped together into verbal taffy.  His words parted one from the other with a lingering reluctance.    So when he talked about how one confronts a hyena in one’s trap, his words sounded not boastful but more a reverie or contemplation. “You rope’em … and choke’em.  It’s just you and your critter, man.  It’s the greatest feeling… in the world.  Time just stops …. and there is nothing else.  A hyena can be just as dangerous as a lion…and anyone who thinks they are cowards… has watched too much….outdated…. nature…television.  “They are hugely fierce animals…in many ways more dangerous than a lion when in a trap…but I look in those big dark eyes…and I….just….disappear….I’m so in love at that moment.” On terms of talking, then, Simpson could probably hold his own with Crockett (who once said he could “grin” raccoons from trees.)  Dairen dressed a modern version of Crockett or Boone as well.   Updated, of course.  He was a fifty and fit version of those famous outdoorsmen. The look was very American western frontier-guy:  sandy colored mustache and rustic short van dyke-like beard. Ruddy complexion. Pale blue eyes.  Dark red-brown hair.   Big seven-inch barrel revolver in a cross-draw on his left hip. The garb:  The House of American Pragmatic. No buckskins or coonskin cap, of course.  No costume.  He wore blue jeans – Wranglers, cause they cost less -- and a durable short-sleeved khaki double-pocket shirt of no discernible brand.  Sears maybe.  No Patagonia labels here. No North Face.  No GoreTex, Orvis, not a trace even of durable L.L. Bean or Cathcartt.  Faded tan camo braces held up the jeans, and he wore a battered, greasy but rakishly tilted full-brimmed hat – “Old Friend,” he called it.  And the look and the talk all seemed to work and walk.   He was six-four, muscular, fearless, it seemed.   You could see him as Crockett steeped in the spirit of the 19th century American frontier, reborn, set free on the African plains.   He had this loopy big stride and loopy big grin and a charismatic smile that sometimes left his face, but hardly ever his eyes.   If matters seemed too serious, if back in Kenya a year or so back, someone messed up and spooked a lion, for example, and no harm was really done, he had a knack.  He would disarm the tension – and also instruct -- by dropping a back-woodsy one-liner in that slow western drawl.   “Why, son if you…shine that light…at that lion…one more time, I will…slap…the…taste…right out of your mouth…” In our crew,  the laughter at such lines would come in waves.  First, I would chuckle softly, then the Germans, fluent in English, would laugh just a half –step behind as they parsed the nuance in translation.  Simultaneously, the Tanzanians would guffaw in delight, then say the word “taste” in Swahili, elaborate on the meaning, riff off the meaning, and laugh again as they savored the new humor. Still, as Simpson faced off with the hyena, no one was laughing and while his taste might still have been present, in truth the smile did seem to have been slapped away, figuratively speaking.  Nearly gone from his eyes, too, it seemed, and had been vacating that territory for a day or two, at least.  Circumstances here had turned him first frustrated, then a bit desperate and then a bit angry.      Africa happens.  That is how I came to think of the phenomenon.  The cultural differences, the red tape, the severe poverty, the magical beliefs and superstitions, the bureaucracies and the lack of infrastructure all can unravel the best of western intentions and have for centuries of course.   It’s not just an African creation, the Africa happens phenomenon.  Far from it.  The expectation of western “givens”– of order, of logic, of electricity, of guns and ammo, of clean water, fresh food and meat – accelerates, even causes, the phenomenon, and with a dash of western arrogance, can prove disastrous. Aside from Africa happening, there was no doubt he also was very tired and had been for a while.   He was 53 now.  The sand fly parasite he had acquired in Bolivia chasing Jaguars – leischmaniagis brazilinzis was the parasite’s scientific name – was back.  Amastigotes, essentially sub-cellular sized eggs, were again active and his whole right cheek was slightly swollen as his immune system attempted to fight back the hatch there.  Two fistula-like pores had appeared and that almost meant more chemo back at Duke University.  Exhausting stuff. Tanzania had been tough on him, too, with long hours in the bush and little success.  Then there was the magic curse – or maziranga in Swahili.  In Kenya, in South Africa, Simpson was a near-celebrity.  Bwana Simba, they called him on the savannahs of Kenya.   His exploits were successful and legendary in South Africa as well. But Tanzania was different – more difficult terrain. Both geographic and bureaucratic.  Also, the lions here were true man-eaters, not the tourist-habituated tabbies of Kenya or Tanzania’s Serengeti to the north.  Here, they were elusive, operating in heavy bush, tall grass, deep woods.  In one sense, the lions were bold, seizing humans from villages in broad daylight.  But they also had learned to be wary, to choose the helpless humans and run like hell and hide from the ones with rifles, shotguns and spears. The spring trapping expedition in southern Tanzania had failed.  “Bwana Dudu” (rhymes with boo-boo), the villagers had called him -- one who was cursed by the spirit lions and the ghosts of the invisible world.  The man-eaters were not normal lions.  They were the dudu’s, the “pests of the bush.”   (Sixty years earlier, not far from this spot, warden George Rushby hunted down a pride of man-eaters who were called “the insects of the woods” – essentially the same concept.) Never would some of the villagers say the word lion – simba in Swahili – out of fear of offending the spirit lions, the dudus.  But he knew what they meant.  Dudu and simba were the same, he would say.  But to some villagers, he was a marked man.  Bwana  Dudu.   The dudus would get him, they kept saying.   And in Tanzania, a land of magical beliefs, these declarations sometimes became self-fulfilling.   He had snared a leopard then, and that shut up some of his worst detractors. But he had been unable to snare a lion.  No simba, no dudu. So he was down on himself.  “I’m just the guy who didn’t get the job done last time,” he said, when first we met in Dar es Salaam in September 2006 and I asked whether he did consider himself the best trapper in the world, as Craig Packer, of Savannas Forever, said he was.  “There are plenty of guys as good or better than me.” Then, there was question of the bait. Or, to put it more accurately, there was the question of why there was no bait.  We were lucky the first day and the Tanzanian Wildlife Department bagged us a nice hartebeest – a beautiful antelope about the size of a small white tail deer -- for Simpson’s traps.   The traps were well set, but hyena and other smaller animals slipped in and consumed much of the hartebeest without being snared by the lion-sized loops laid out. This is not uncommon.   Often, this sort of trapping was an iterative process. You learned the habits of the hyenas the first night – or they learned yours and then stayed away.   Then, the second night, or the third or the fourth or the fifth, you snared the lions. Checking the traps the first day, Simpson found that a hyena had “slipped through the back door”—parted his brush wall and gotten the bait from behind. “I’m going to set a little surprise for this one,” he said, as he began re-rigging the trap with sets at the front and backdoor.  “This is personal.  It’s about respect. You don’t do this to me twice.” And indeed, the old girl hyena in the snare now had tried to come through the back-door and run into Simpson’s new surprise. But past that first hartebeest, there was no more bait.  First the wildlife department said they were out of bullets.  Then, they said the bait quota had been reached. So now there were only pieces of what the hyenas had left, just scraps to lure in lions.   We could not set five traps.  We barely could set one. We pooled our biggest piece of hartebeest and put all our chips on one trap. “Man, where is the bait?” Simpson kept saying to himself.  “You cannot trap a lion if you do not have bait.  This is leopard bait, hyena bait, not lion bait.  I’m going to look like a fool here if I don’t get bait for lions.  They’re going to blame me and say I failed again, but you just can’t trap, you absolutely cannot trap, without the damned bait.” Then, too, tranquilizer was in short supply.  Four ampoules were to have been sent to us; two were empty; one had a shelf date of 2004.   That left one – not enough for the four to eight lions the Tanzanian Wildlife Research Center wanted.   What if he got a leopard in the next trap, instead of a hyena?  Rope and choke that, cowboy.   He’d have to use a dart.  And you damned well better use the good stuff on a leopard.   Then what to use on the lions?  Others were concerned about the progress here as well and had reputations on the line.  Simpson through my eyes was Davy Crocket, or seemed to be. Dr. Craig Packer, the overall head of the expedition, differed only in his choice of American personalities.  “He’s Wild Bill Hickock – what else can I say?  He is the best there is.” Through African eyes?  No one among the Western media was sure.  Was he real?  Or some American creation, some California weirdo?   Someone who had watched too many movies and liked to play in Africa.   As Simpson prepared to go meet the hyena, my thoughts weren’t skeptical at the moment.  Were what?  Focused fear, I guess. Focused, certainly.  The kind of focus where you are totally alert and right at but not quite at the point of fear.   Somewhere inside me was a little guy perched right on the edge of a lever marked “adrenaline” ready to throw it with all his might – but not quite.  I’d existed in this state for the past 90 seconds or so, from the time Simpson left the front seat of our overland vehicle, just before he set out for the trap, and asked me a small favor.     Actually, it was not a direct question, just a weary statement of fact between him and me as he leaned toward me, slapped the shotgun softly, placed it in the front seat of our vehicle, and said so only I could hear. “There are seven in the magazine, Bob.   Chamber’s empty so pump it once to load, just in case you need to know. ”  That was when the invisible little guy emerged on my shoulder next to the invisible little adrenaline switch. Simpson had closely guarded the weapon and considered it more dangerous in others’ hands than facing animals without backup.  I’d been around guns as a kid and thought about volunteering for backup earlier.  The game rangers sent for our protection had primitive single-shot weapons – and no ammunition.  I thought it might be helpful to have someone armed at Simpson’s back, but stifled the offer for two reasons. I was a journalist – an observer.  And Simpson precisely had said several times that no one touched the shotgun but him.  It was not an uncommon demand.  Most professional hunters considered their armed clients the most dangerous animal in Africa. No one may have wanted to touch the damned thing.  For it was one snaky-piece of mean business -- a flat black, matte-finished Model 870 Remington with a long seven-shell magazine nearly as long as the short 18 ½ inch barrel – the minimum in the States before it was ‘sawed-off” and a felony.  The pump was loaded alternately with double 0 – nine lead balls of 54 grams each -- and then shells with rifle-like slugs of about 400 grams.   Both types of loads were tucked into three-inch magnum shells with hotted-up high-velocity loads.   The idea was to spray and pray, as Dairen put it.   If a lion was charging from the tall grass, you fired first the spray of the double 0 – vaguely like getting shot simultaneously by four .357 magnums  -- then the skull-penetrating slug, then the next shell of double 0 and so on.   It wasn’t sporting, but it wasn’t a sure thing either. It was meant as a defensive gun.  Still, even this was  dicey when you considered that lions shot through the heart often manage to run on pure adrenalin for thirty yards and then kill the person who killed them.   The only way you stopped that hyper-driven charge was a shot to the brain or spine, and if a curtain of shot and a stream of slugs could do that, that is what Simpson would offer.   He was a humane trapper, not human bait.   But he was carrying only his pistol and leaving the shotgun in the Land Cruiser – for me as back up apparently.  How else to interpret his remarks about seven in the magazine, pump it once to chamber it “in case you need to know”?  I had so not come here for the hyena hunting.   I was here trying to understand both sides of the human-animal conflicts in this part of the world.   Earlier, I had written about the lions of Kruger National Park in South Africa and how they had come to begin eating the desperate refugees from Mozambique as they attempted to cross the park.   Few acknowledged the problem in South Africa, even in the post-apartheid climate of truth and reconciliation.  Lions were the rock stars of safari tourism there.  Mozambican refugees were a nuisance and few suggested means of mitigating the problem.   I thought that a strange marker of our civilization and a stranger comment on the Western world of conservation – my world, essentially.   As that work was ending, word came from Tanzania of a situation that was similar yet in some ways distinctly different than my experience in South Africa.   Professor Packer of the University of Minnesota, one of the world’s great lion experts, and his associate, Dennis Ikanda, a researcher at the Tanszanian Wildlife Research Institute, wrote in “Nature” magazine that man-eating behavior was on the increase in that African country.  Unlike South Africa, Tanzania was at least acknowledging the problem and supporting research on how this state of affairs came to be – and might be changed.    The efforts of Packer-Ikanda, coupled with the government sanction and “air cover” was leading to a full-fledged study of “lion-human” conflict – a euphemism here for man-eating behavior by lions.     This was by its nature controversial.  For the study was not just literally “belling the cats”  -- the lions suspected of man-eating – but also belling the conservation movement.  It was attaching to environmentalism the annoying tinkle of the bell of research that showed all good green things were perhaps not so good after all. The article in “Nature” suggested that the near ideal wildlife conservation laws of Tanzania were contributing directly to the deaths of innocent villagers.   It was a concept that burst the paradigm of most greens, including mine, that the preservation of nature was in and of itself good.   To be clear, the study endorsed the Tanzanian system, but noted – uniquely in its clarity so far as I can see – that there was a next step to be taken, preserving the villagers and their economies that had not been taken.  It was welcome news to the ears of many Africans, who for years have looked upon western conservation with skepticism as elephants trampled crops and farmers, lions tore through thatched roofs snatched family members, and crocodiles and hippos took a terrible toll of those near rivers and lakes. Simpson was helping Ikanda and Packer attempt to gather more data on the lions to determine what those next steps might be. The man-eaters were just too clever to dart; trapping seemed the only chance to collar them and track their movements.  And then what?  Perhaps, Ikanda hoped, the data from the collars and movements might allow him to predict when conditions pointed to an outbreak of man-eating, as sometimes occurred when the drought or heavy rain came.  Perhaps the government or the villagers would be able to take steps to mitigate the deaths then. Unspoken in the study, but understood by the expedition, was the fact that saving people eventually saved wildlife.  Lions might kill a few hundred people in an area, but eventually the payback game in the form of overkill. It was not uncommon for African army personnel to sweep areas and kill any lion, man-eater or not.  Then, too, cheap wire snares cost only a few cents, and poison was even cheaper.   I had been invited along to chronicle the trip.  I was also taking a break from my corporate job for some rest and relaxation.  (Drives at dawn and dusk with long stretches in between were indeed downright soothing.) But I saw a broader mission on this, the second of what I came to refer to as “investigative safaris.”   I wanted to fairly capture the interplay of the Western view, and the African view of wildlife and conservation.  I wanted to record how the works of Simpson, Ikanda, and Packer – all of whom represented various blends of Western and African views -- fit into the tableaux of modern-day conservation, and how average Tanzanians did or did not manage to find a place within the mosaic of that picture. “Western attitudes toward wildlife are fixed by National Geographic and David Attenborough documentaries,” wrote Raymond Bonner in his book, “At the Hand of Man” a few years back – one of the few authors to challenge western conservation.  “They depict the wonder and magnificence of the animals. “But they provide little if any understanding of the people of Africa,” he continued. “Very few Westerners who come to Africa on safari leave with any feelings for the people…They stay in Western-managed hotels, fly between parks, are chauffeured around in minivans.  The only contact they have with Africans, other than those who on them, is through the lens of a camera.” Let’s be clear.  The joys of a luxury African safari will not be diminished here. I’ve been on one and would go again in a moment.  They are a magical, spiritual experience, or can be.   But I no longer wanted just that experience.  Not any more.  I wanted all points of view. So there was the American trapper to consider.  And the American professor, too, who had spent 30 years in Tanzania, more or less.  Then there was Ikanda, the Tanzanian scientist leading our expedition, representative of the first generation of Africans stewarding the conservation movement.   And there were the villagers who were being eaten and attacked at a rate that had tripled since 1990.  Even the National Geographic Explorer magazine, a stalwart of conservation establishmentarianism, agreed this might be a problem in the south.   “Not only have lion attacks on people increased dramatically in the past 15 years in Tanzania—with more than 800 incidents resulting in 563 deaths and at least 308 injuries during that time—but almost half of those cases occurred in six coastal di