Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) has blamed the increased human-wildlife conflicts in Kisumu County on encroachment by residents on the animals’ habitat.
The agency said humans are increasingly invading the animals’ territory, kicking them out in search of land for cultivation and inhabitancy.
County community warden, Fredrick Kisera says: “The number of people clearing forests and wetland vegetation and breaking rocks for assimilation is on the rise.Those areas have served as wildlife habitats for long and their destruction places both the animals and humans on a conflict path,” he said.
Kisera added that the animals were at a higher risk of being killed and that subsistence poaching rampant in parts of the county also drove the animals out of their habitat, fuelling conflict.
The KWS agent said wildlife outside restricted parks and conservancies formed 70 per cent of the total population. He warned that conflicts resulting in the killing of the animals threatened their population, and the agency would not condone animal brutality.
The past two months have seen residents of Muhoroni, Nyando, Seme and Nyakach sub-counties in Kisumu County and Rongo in Homabay come in conflict with marauding leopards, hippos, venomous snakes and hyenas, in that that order.
In the past two weeks alone, four fully grown black mambas and a python were killed in various parts in Seme and Kisumu West sub-counties after residents came face to face with them in their homes and farms.
In early October, five representatives of over 300 rice farmers from East Kano stormed KWS offices in Kisumu demanding compensation for losses caused by hippos that had destroyed their plantations.
This was a week after a village in Rongo, Homabay County reported that ten sheep had been killed by marauding hyenas. In Koru and Muhoroni, residents were expressing fear over leopards that lurked in sugarcane plantations as threatening to their school-going children and cane farmers.
Elsewhere, monkeys were reported to be a menace to maize farmers in Seme and Maseno.
And while the agency maintained that those affected were encroaching on wildlife habitats, the residents said that in some areas, control measures were not viable and called for relocation of animals.
The rice farmers said the swampy farms did not allow for digging of trenches to bar the hippos. Those conflicting with hyenas, leopards and snakes said they could not vacate their premises and asked the agency to contain the mammals.
They also demanded compensation for losses suffered due to attacks by the animals.