The man-eating leopard of Laikipia

Until only a few years ago, the constellations blazed across the sky above the farm at night and there was not a single electric light on any horizon. On many evenings I found myself with my rangers sleeping on the tracks of cattle rustlers heading into Kenya’s wild north with no fences between us and the Ethiopian frontier. Today the wildness is gone, the tarmac almost reaches our farmstead, the phone network reaches everywhere and the good old days of gunfire and adventures and great dances of warriors with their beads and flashing spears will survive only in memory. And so it is quite surprising when even today a man gets eaten by a leopard a stone’s throw away from home.

Our home county of Laikipia has its share of animal attack survivors: I know people who have been gored by buffalo, grabbed on the ankle by a crocodile, mauled by lion, and, the worst I ever saw, savaged by a hyena. A few years ago an elephant sadly killed our immediate neighbour. Tragically people do get killed, yet since records began in Kenya surprisingly few people have died at the hands of lion, elephant, buffalo, rhino, snakes, crocodile, hippo or bees. When I was a boy, a python completely swallowed a German hippie who was camping near a lake on the Tanzanian border. A buffalo used its rough tongue to lick the skin off a man’s leg as he sat in a low thorn tree where he had taken refuge to get away from the charging beast – and buffalo have killed a number of people along with hippos that attack especially if you get in the way of their path back to water.