African warriors trade secrets with Arizona cowboys

NAIROBI, Kenya - Maasai warriors and Arizona cowboys appreciate many of the same things - healthy cattle, roasted meat and the open plains - so it's no wonder they struck up a friendship that has helped improve their ranches.

A group of Maasai departed for Arizona on Wednesday to learn how to merge ancient Kenyan traditions with modern American agriculture, reciprocation for a visit by a group of Arizona cowboys in 2002.

Ranchers from the Malpai Borderlands Group of Douglas, Ariz., will show off the conservation and economic benefits of open rangelands when Maasai from Kenya and Tanzania spend a week with them.

The Arizona ranchers came to Kenya in October 2002 and shared their experiences with the Maasai. Both groups have resisted government pressure to fence in their land and drive off wildlife, said James Ndung'u of the African Conservation Center, which helped the groups meet.

During the Americans' stay, Yusuf Ole Petenya listened to Bill Miller and his wife, Carol, share their life story over a meal of nyama choma - or roast meat, a must-have in Kenya - and recognized his own.

"They live like Maasai, but their environment is different. They do things according to the clock," Petenya said. "Once a Maasai starts grazing his cattle, he's not in a hurry."

But many other things were the same.

"They milk their cattle, graze them, water them, take them to dips just like we do. Even they were surprised there were similarities between the Maasai and cowboys," Petenya said.

Like the Maasai, Malpai ranchers not only think of their herds when pondering the future, they keep in mind the wildlife that shares the open rangelands, such as the endangered Mexican jaguar, the recently reintroduced thick-billed parrots, or the rare Chiricahua leopard frog.

"We believe that our work will continue to show that cattle are not just compatible with rare species, but often they are beneficial. We've found that if you do the right thing for one, it tends to help the other," Bill McDonald, the group's executive director, said on its Web site.

Petenya said his American visitors told him they too had come under pressure from government officials to modernize and change their ways, to graze their cattle on less land, to subdivide their property or quit ranching.

When the Malpai ranchers subdivided their rangeland, which totals 800,000 acres, cattle overgrazed the 100-acre plots, which adversely affected the environment and wildlife that had lived there. Eventually they opened some of their prairies and are working to restore all of them.

In 2002, the Malpai ranchers decided to reach out to other ranchers with similar experiences because "after going through the bad stages and then the recovery they thought they owed it" to others to share the lessons they learned, Ndung'u said.

Petenya said he hopes to learn the skills the Malpai Borderlands Group used to lobby government officials and lawmakers to rethink their policies on ranching, so that "we can try to form a group here that can access (President Mwai) Kibaki" and avoid the same mistakes.

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