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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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090489
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09048900.030
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1990-09-22
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WORLD, Page 21KENYAMurder in the Game ReserveRoving poachers bring down the man who helped lions live free
All lions, conservation pioneer George Adamson once wrote,
"have been designed and perfected by nature to kill." But the
former game warden who became foster father to dozens of lion cubs
finally fell victim to deadlier animals -- men armed with assault
rifles. Adamson, 83, and two of his assistants were shot to death
last week when he drove his Land Rover straight at three bandits
in an attempt to rescue another employee and a woman guest who had
been waylaid near his bush camp in northeastern Kenya. By midweek,
police had seized three suspects.
Adamson, born in India, moved to Kenya in 1924 and in 1938
joined the government wildlife department. In the 1960s he and his
wife Joy gained worldwide fame from her best-selling books, like
Born Free and Living Free, which recounted their adventures raising
captive or orphaned young lions to return to the wild. She was
murdered in 1980 by a servant who had been accused of theft and
fired.
Last week's attack was apparently the latest in a prolonged
war between the Kenyan government and heavily armed bands of
poachers set on pursuing the illegal trade in ivory, rhinoceros
horns and leopard and lion skins. Richard Leakey, the noted
paleoanthropologist who directs Kenya's wildlife service, said the
killers would probably turn out to be poachers from neighboring
Somaliland. These nomads are paid almost nothing for the hacked-off
trophies, which are later sold for hundreds of millions of dollars
in Asian and Middle Eastern markets.
Relentless poachers have thinned the ranks of some animals to
perilous levels. In the past ten years, for example, they cut
Kenya's elephant population from 65,000 to 17,000. This threatens
to extinguish not only the species but also income from tourism,
which last year totaled $390 million. Kenya's antipoaching rangers
have counterattacked, sweeping the armed invaders out of the
national parks and killing 23 of them since mid-May.
Ironically, the success of the rangers has driven the poachers
into banditry of the kind that killed George Adamson. During
similar attacks in July, two French tourists and an American woman
were shot dead. Nevertheless, the animals are still more at risk
than humans. Friends of Adamson say even some of the lions he
raised and set free have fallen to poachers' bullets.