A conservation programme in five Botswana villages has reversed a decade of lion killings — and its success could determine whether ancient wildlife migration routes, blocked since the 1950s, are ever reopened.
What You'll Learn
By 2013, farmers in northern Botswana had poisoned or shot more than half the Okavango's lion population in a single year. Today, lion numbers are up 50%. This article explains what changed — and why the same approach could reopen wildlife migration routes sealed off for decades.
- ✓ Why unguarded cattle, not malice, drove the poisonings — and what ended them
- ✓ How a canvas wall does something a steel fence cannot
- ✓ Why cattle herding is now the key to taking down the cordon fences that have blocked wildebeest migrations since the 1950s
- ✓ What a safari lodge's beef order has to do with lion survival
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Reporting for this article draws from Mongabay's feature by Gloria Dickie (February 2026), a January 2026 qualitative risk assessment published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, and the AHEAD Programme's livestock disease risk assessment for the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area.
Jack Ramsden grew up in Maun, a village on the edge of Botswana's Okavango Delta, at a time when lions still moved freely through the land around it. "During my dad's days, it was active herding 24/7 with the cattle," he recalled. Maun had a large lion population. That changed as herding disappeared. By the end of 2013, around 30 lions — more than half the northern Okavango population — had been poisoned or shot by exasperated farmers in a single year. The lions were killing unguarded cattle. The farmers were killing the lions. Without herding, there was no buffer between the two.
"Now if a lion comes there, it's like a comet flying through the skies," said Ramsden. "It's something that some generations never see."
More than a decade later, Ramsden works as herding programme coordinator for CLAWS Conservancy — and the situation in the northern Okavango has been transformed. The lion population has increased by 50% over four years. Cattle losses have dropped to around ten animals over five years, compared to dozens or hundreds lost annually before the programme began. The turnaround has drawn attention from wildlife managers across southern Africa — not only for what it has done for lions, but for what it might unlock next: wildlife migration routes sealed off for decades.
Andrew Stein, CLAWS's founder, says the approach is broadly transferable. "It can be adapted to just about anywhere."
Why Were Villagers Killing Lions — and How Bad Did It Get?
Lions occupy a precarious position across sub-Saharan Africa. In the last 25 years, more than half have disappeared from the continent's plains, largely because of conflicts with communities whose livelihoods depend on livestock. As human populations have expanded, the cats have been pushed into fragmented, isolated pockets. Fewer than 25,000 remain continent-wide, down from an estimated 200,000 in the early twentieth century. One large continuous population still roams the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA), a five-country protected zone spanning Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. But even that population faces growing pressure at its edges, wherever farming communities and unguarded cattle create the conditions for fatal conflict.
In northern Botswana, that pressure had become acute by the early 2010s. Stein arrived in the region in 2014 and identified the source of the problem quickly. Traditional herding — the practice of moving cattle carefully through the landscape under constant human supervision — had all but disappeared. For generations, young boys had been responsible for watching over herds throughout the day, keeping predators at a distance and guiding animals back to enclosures at night. But as school enrolment expanded and children spent their days in classrooms, no one replaced them.
"Of course, we want people to get educated, but it left a gap," Stein said. "And the adult men of the village did not want to be perceived to do the low-status job of a child." Cattle roamed widely and unsupervised. Lions, presented with accessible prey, took it. Farmers, losing income, retaliated with poison. What had once been a functional, if informal, system of coexistence had collapsed into a cycle of attrition that neither side could win.
By 2013, the northern Okavango had lost more than half its lions in twelve months. But the poisoning deaths were only part of the damage. As farmers killed alpha males, disruption spread through prides in ways that were not immediately visible. New males moved into the territory and killed existing cubs to establish their own genetic lines — a behaviour well-documented in lion biology, but one that accelerates dramatically when human-caused mortality keeps removing dominant males. Between 2014 and 2017, only about a third of lion cubs in the area reached adulthood. The population was dying faster than it could replace itself. The scale of that collapse pointed clearly toward the only intervention that would actually work: getting people back out with the cattle.
What Is the Lion Alert System?
CLAWS's first intervention was the Lion Alert System: GPS collars fitted to lions in the northern Okavango, with automated alerts sent to farmers' mobile phones whenever a collared animal was detected moving toward a settlement or livestock area. The system gave communities advance warning — time to bring cattle together, reinforce enclosures, or shift herding routes before a confrontation occurred rather than after.
Stein and his colleagues also encouraged communities to name the lions in their local languages. "That's important because they are the ones that are going to decide whether these animals live or die at the end of the day," he explained. Some of the names that emerged were telling about the shifting relationship. Mayenga meant "the one who is decorated by the Gods." As conflict persisted, others were named Kufakuduze — "if you come for my cattle, I will find you." But then there were names like Shedipatera: "the one who belongs to us."
The naming programme was not sentimental window-dressing. When you have given a predator a name, watched its movements through your phone, and know its habits and range, your relationship to its death changes. The GPS system and the names were working the same problem from different angles — both were trying to build a sense of individual identity around animals that communities had previously experienced only as a collective, unpredictable threat. Individualised management, as Stein describes it, creates space for non-lethal responses.
But early warning alone could not hold the system together. Farmers still needed to know where their cattle were. The fundamental problem — that no one was watching the herd — still needed solving.
How It Works: The Mobile Canvas Boma
At night, CLAWS deploys circular canvas stockades that can be moved to wherever the herd is grazing. When cattle are enclosed behind the canvas, lions approach — they can hear and smell them — but without a visual trigger, they do not attack.
Lions are ambush predators. They must be able to see prey before committing to a hunt. The canvas wall does not need to be impenetrable; it only needs to break that visual line. Steel-wire fencing, by contrast, is visually transparent, which is why canvas outperforms it despite being far cheaper and portable.
During daylight hours, trained herders move cattle through rotational grazing routes, keeping the herd together and away from areas where lion movements have been detected through the GPS alert system.
How Does a Canvas Wall Stop a Lion?
The herding programme that Ramsden coordinates runs across five villages in northern Botswana, covering around 5,000 cattle in total. Roughly 700 of those are enrolled in CLAWS's full programme, managed by 24 trained herders working across three villages. Herders receive training not only in predator management but in rangeland ecology, rotational grazing, and basic veterinary care — a curriculum that treats the job as skilled and professional rather than the residual task it had become in the years when children held it.
At night, the programme deploys the mobile canvas bomas. "When the cattle are behind the canvas sheet, the lions will approach," Stein explained. "They'll walk along the outside. They can hear the cattle. They can smell the cattle. But if they don't see them, they don't actually jump in and attack." Lions that cannot see prey do not commit to a hunt. The barrier does not need to be impenetrable — it only needs to break the visual trigger.
The results are difficult to argue with. In the five years since the herding programme reached its current form, the villages involved have lost around ten cattle in total to predation — a figure that compares to dozens or sometimes hundreds of animals lost annually before CLAWS's intervention. Fewer cattle deaths means fewer dead lions: the motivation to poison predators disappears when the losses stop. When predators stop being poisoned, something else changes too — the social dynamics within lion prides stabilise.
Now that fewer males are being killed, cub survivorship has risen from roughly one in three to 70%. The northern Okavango lion population has increased by 50% over four years — not through reintroduction or fenced protection, but through reducing the rate of human-caused mortality at the boundary between farming and wild land.
Can a Beef Premium Save a Predator?
Conservation grants fund CLAWS today, but Stein's long-term goal is a programme that pays for itself. In May 2025, the first sale of 14 cattle certified as Wildlife-Friendly Beef — raised under herding practices that prevent overgrazing and produced by farmers who have pledged not to kill lions — went to Vumbura Plains Camp, a wilderness safari lodge in the Okavango Delta, at a 10% premium above typical rural market rates.
CLAWS plans quarterly sales of around 15 animals this year, with ambitions to expand to other ecotourism operators as the programme grows. If cattle raised under wildlife-friendly conditions fetch a better price, farmers have a direct financial reason to maintain those conditions — and the premium makes the calculation of poisoning a lion a losing one. "It is giving them greater market access where their cattle are actually worth something," Stein said. "Then they are going to be more likely to look after them."
Ramsden sees the market programme as inseparable from the ecological one. If herding expands to cover the majority of cattle in the region, the rotational grazing practices that go with it will improve rangeland condition — leading to healthier soils, better forage, and more productive cattle. "You can get better rangelands," Ramsden said. "And better rangelands will lead to healthier and more productive cattle."
The challenge is getting from 700 cattle enrolled to a number large enough to change conditions across the region. CLAWS is currently raising $11 million to expand the herding programme to 14 main communities across Botswana's Eastern Panhandle over the next five years. That expansion is a conservation target in itself — and a political prerequisite for something larger.
The Cordon Fences: What They Did, and Whether They Could Come Down
In the 1950s, governments across southern Africa began erecting veterinary cordon fences stretching thousands of kilometres across the landscape. The purpose was to keep wild ungulates and domestic livestock apart, blocking the transmission of diseases like foot-and-mouth and bovine pleuropneumonia. European export markets required proof that beef came from disease-free zones. Fences became the mechanism for that proof — and in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, they became a permanent feature of the management landscape.
Hundreds of thousands of wild herbivores — possibly millions — have died at or because of these fences. Wildebeest, zebras, giraffes, buffaloes, and hartebeest have been snared in steel cables, chased into fences by predators, or cut off from seasonal water sources. In some parts of northern Botswana, the fences have trapped elephant populations in areas too small to support them, concentrating pressure on local vegetation and intensifying conflict with surrounding communities. When matriarchal herds can't follow their traditional routes into Namibia, the whole herd stays put — and competition for resources with communities grows.
Steven Osofsky, professor of wildlife health and health policy at Cornell University, witnessed the effects directly during his time as Botswana's first wildlife veterinary officer in the early 1990s. He watched animals cut off from grazing, freshwater, and breeding opportunities, and has spent the decades since working toward a different approach. "Back in the 1950s and 1960s, wildlife was not considered a valued resource," Osofsky said. "And what followed over the ensuing decades could be described as a slow-motion environmental trainwreck." The economic calculus that once justified the fences has also shifted: agriculture contributes between 2% and 4% to Botswana's GDP, while tourism contributes between 5% and 12%. The intact ecosystem is now worth more than the protected beef market the fences were built to serve.
A January 2026 study by Osofsky and colleagues, published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, found that removing the top 62 kilometres of the Northern Buffalo Fence — which cuts off a key corridor between the Okavango Delta and the Zambezi-Chobe floodplain — would not increase disease transmission risk. When combined with restored herding practices, the overall disease risk would in fact be lower than the current status quo. "We literally have the data to say, you can take this down and it wouldn't change anything," Osofsky said. The eastern 35 kilometres of the Zambezi fence was similarly identified as a candidate for removal.
The Botswana government has agreed to consider removing key fence sections, but with a condition attached: communities must demonstrate that they are willing and able to adopt strategic herding at scale. For millennia, elephants in northern Botswana and northeastern Namibia moved as a single population across the region's floodplains, following rainfall and seasonal forage along routes shaped over generations. The fences severed those patterns in a few decades. Restoring herding doesn't automatically reopen the corridors — but it removes the disease justification for keeping the fences up, and with it the political barrier to their removal. Under a best-case scenario, Osofsky says the first sections could come down within five years.
It is a long chain of dependencies: farmers learning to herd again, cattle fetching premium prices, lion populations stabilising, disease risk assessments satisfying governments, fence sections coming down, wildebeest and zebra moving freely through a landscape they crossed for thousands of years before a wire cable stopped them. CLAWS is working on all of it at once, in five villages, with 24 herders and 700 cattle. The expansion to 14 communities is where the approach either proves itself at meaningful scale — or reveals where its limits lie.
By the Numbers
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did lion killings increase in northern Botswana?
As school enrolment expanded across the region, young boys who had traditionally watched cattle throughout the day were no longer available. Adult men considered the work low-status, so herds were left unsupervised. Lions took unguarded livestock; farmers responded with poison. The problem was a collapse in a traditional management system, not a change in attitudes toward wildlife.
How does a canvas boma prevent lion attacks?
Lions are ambush predators that rely on visual targeting before committing to a hunt. A canvas wall breaks that line of sight — lions can smell and hear cattle inside but do not attack without seeing them. The canvas boma does not need to be impenetrable, only visually opaque. Because it is portable, it can follow the herd wherever it grazes overnight.
What are the veterinary cordon fences, and why do they matter for wildlife?
Cordon fences were built from the 1950s onward to separate wild ungulates from domestic livestock and satisfy European beef export certification requirements. In northern Botswana, they have blocked wildebeest and zebra migration routes for decades. A January 2026 study in Frontiers in Veterinary Science found that removing key sections would not increase disease risk when combined with strategic herding — removing the primary justification for keeping the fences in place.
What is Wildlife-Friendly Beef and how does it benefit communities?
Wildlife-Friendly Beef is a certification for cattle raised under herding practices that prevent overgrazing, produced by farmers who have pledged not to kill predators. The first certified sale achieved a 10% premium above typical rural market rates. If the premium scales across the region, it creates a direct financial incentive for farmers to maintain the herding practices that keep livestock safe — and lions alive.
What would fence removal mean for the wider KAZA region?
The Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA) spans five countries and holds one of Africa's last large continuous lion populations. Removing key fence sections would reopen elephant and large herbivore migration corridors that have been severed since the 1950s, allowing populations to follow seasonal forage and water across national boundaries. The Botswana government has indicated it will consider removals once communities demonstrate herding at scale — a process CLAWS is currently working to enable through its planned expansion to 14 communities.
Media enquiries: For interviews with CLAWS Conservancy or research contacts related to this article, please use the contact details available at clawsbotswana.org.
