Positive News · 2 hours ago

Smartphones, Ancient Tracking Skills and a Future for Desert Lions - Positive News

In the Kunene region of Namibia, a man named Benjamin Kordom farms the same arid land that lions cross at night - and he wouldn't have it any other way. As field coordinator for the Lion Rangers programme, he oversees more than 40 rangers who blend GPS collars and smartphone software with tracking skills passed down through generations, working daily to keep both livestock and lions alive in a landscape strained by drought and shifting rainfall. The programme has helped reduce human-lion conflict by a third, and in six conservancies, illegal lion killings have stopped entirely. Yet what the technology cannot fully account for is something Kordom himself embodies: the willingness of people who have lost everything to drought to still insist on coexistence. "I won't say there must be no lions, or that there must be no farming," he says. "Let's try to live together with these lions."