Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com --- Wednesday, July 31, 2013
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Last Year's Lions | The Wildlife Society News
By Alexandra E. Sutton
A young boy herdsman (laiyoni) stands at his father?s ?boma,? a livestock enclosure. (Credit: Alexandra E. Suttton)
Jambo!
My first field notes blog introduced the goal of my project here in Kenya: to study the effectiveness of predator-proof fences in reducing human-carnivore conflict in the Western Mara. Now, I?ll write a bit about how I plan to conduct my research.
Unfortunately, there?s no perfect way (short of a time machine) to collect information about past predation rates. So I?m gathering data from a number of different sources to put together a clear picture of past predation. These include historical records of compensation paid to herders for loss of livestock, more recent yet patchy data on predation events, and retrospective interviews with herders.
By drawing on all of these data sources, I believe that we can uncover information that will help us reach our ultimate goal: to inform and improve conservation work here in the western Mara.
Historical Records
Although there are some historical records in the western Mara, they are spotty and imperfect. Some handwritten accounts of predation rest in the Mara North Conservancy?s headquarters and in the main office at Oloololo Gate, but these records cover only a small number of historical predation events, and are often secondhand accounts. Nonetheless, historical records (even imperfect ones) can provide an important buttress to the information that we gain now about current and recent predation.
These historical records also fall prey to a reporting bias problem: the Mara Conservancy compensated cattle owners until 2005 for ?huge losses? of livestock to predators. As a result, only predation that might have met the ?huge loss? criteria was reported. Although the ?huge loss? incidents might have a significant emotional impact on a cattle owner (one can just imagine the horror of waking up to find 89 goats and sheep killed out of 100), and might even be financially devastating, they often do not represent the bulk of predation.
I?m hoping to get a more complete picture of the ongoing nature of predation ? not just the incidents where a hyena or leopard killed a large number of animals in one sitting. In other words, a sudden break in a water pipe may be painfully costly to a homeowner, but a years-long slow leak might ultimately be a greater loss.
Sutton and her research team reach out to herding communities in the Maasai Mara to help build better livestock enclosures. This enclosure (above) is a traditional ?boma,? built with sticks and acacia thorns. Stronger enclosures (below) are often reinforced with chain link fence,? which reduces predation and, consequently, retaliatory attacks on wildlife. (Credit: Alexandra E. Sutton)
Recent Data
Other conservation groups working in the Mara, such as Friends of Conservation,? are sharing their recent predation data with us. But small staff size limits the ability of these groups to record all predation incidents, so patchiness and bias are inevitable in these data as well.
Interviews & Questionnaires
Interviews and questionnaires can yield incredibly rich information about human experiences; unfortunately, they?re incredibly challenging to perform well, and improper interpretation can produce data that is rife with errors. We?ve adapted survey methods originally developed by Amy Dickman during her work on the same types of human-wildlife conflict in Tanzania.
Working as a team, we?re able to provide simultaneous translation to our interview participants while providing depth and context to any answers we receive. We arrive at each boma (livestock enclosure) owner?s home, usually after giving advance notice to him or to the most senior of his wives. We introduce ourselves and our project and I offer a standard disclaimer that there will be no financial compensation for participating in the survey, or any cost to participate, and that we plan to use the data to help bolster the Anne K. Taylor Fund?s community efforts.
Elias Kamande, Kimoro Sakui, and myself ? all with the Anne K. Taylor Fund ? each play a different linguistic role during the interviews. Kimoro, a field team member, is a native Maa speaker (the Maasai language), and a well-respected member of the local Maasai community. This makes him an excellent community liaison, but he only speaks a small amount of Swahili and very little English. Kimoro can explain (in Swahili) when an interviewee has referenced a local event or has used a Maa aphorism that escapes direct translation. When Kimoro is called away by other duties, Sakat Jackson, a staff member at the Mara North Conservancy and also a native Maa speaker, helps us out.
Elias, our field team leader and a brilliant birder who knows the area?s ecology like the back of his hand, speaks Kikuyu ? the language of the largest ethnic group in Kenya. Elias also speaks Swahili and English quite well, but knows very little Maa. He?s able, however, to translate so that Kimoro and I can communicate with each other.
I am the native English speaker of the group, able to interpret our survey and research goals to Elias and Kimoro in Swahili (and, very rarely, a tiny bit of Maa) using my three years of training in Swahili and two months of immersion in the culture.
Even with these linguistic barriers conquered, the challenge of imperfect recall remains. People rarely remember distant events accurately. For this reason, we are only asking about predation events that occurred during the past year (May 2012 through June 2013).
In order to identify and compensate for outsize estimates of past predation, we ask our questions more than once and in different ways. Early in the interviews (which take about two hours each), we ask boma owners to estimate their total annual predation loss for cattle and smallstock (sheep and goats, also collectively referred to as ?shoats?). Later in the interview, we sit down for an accounting session during which we ask people to describe each predation event by the type of predator, starting with the largest ? lions and working down to the smallest ? honey badgers.
A teenaged herdsman (morani) holds a young goat that was injured by a hyena. Local herdsman are not as concerned with attacks on young livestock as they are with attacks on adults because the young are less valuable. (Credit: Alexandra E. Sutton)
Using the accounting method, the number of predated cattle typically turns out to be about half as many as the owner originally estimated, while the number of predated shoats is actually double the original estimate. This phenomenon might reflect the outsize emotional importance that owners place on cattle in Maasai culture.
The Maasai tend to overlook or ?forgive? predation of juvenile sheep and goats, taking stock only when adult animals are lost. As one Maasai put it, ?You cannot protect every animal. Some things are just lost, but that is okay. The small ones, there are many.? When we press interviewees for full counts of all animals during the accounting process, we often uncover large numbers of lost juvenile smallstock that the owner did not mention initially. So it appears that in this area, there?s a general forgiveness for juvenile smallstock predation, particularly when it occurs outside of the boma. During our interviews, we make every attempt not to call extra attention to the juvenile smallstock losses, hoping to prevent further degradation of the perspective on predators.
These observations give us valuable insight into the types of livestock loss that are more likely to trigger retaliation against local predators. Lions are often the target of retaliatory attacks because they are more likely to prey on cattle, while less concern for smallstock losses may account for the lack of retaliation against smaller predators like jackals and baboons.
Next Steps
I?ll be delving more deeply into my data this week, as I take a week?s break to visit another research group up north, in Laikipia ? a Kenyan district north of the Mara. I look forward to sharing some early insights with you all!
Tutaonana baadaye! (See you later!)
Source: http://news.wildlife.org/featured/last-years-lions/
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Tuesday, July 30, 2013
GOP donor's school grade changed
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - INDIANAPOLIS (AP) ? Former Indiana and current Florida schools chief Tony Bennett built his national star by promising to hold "failing" schools accountable. But when it appeared an Indianapolis charter school run by a prominent Republican donor might receive a poor grade, Bennett's education team frantically overhauled his signature "A-F" school grading system to improve the school's marks.
Emails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan's school received an "A," despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a "C."
"They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work," Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence's chief lobbyist.
The emails, which also show Bennett discussed with staff the legality of changing just DeHaan's grade, raise unsettling questions about the validity of a grading system that has broad implications. Indiana uses the A-F grades to determine which schools get taken over by the state and whether students seeking state-funded vouchers to attend private school need to first spend a year in public school. They also help determine how much state funding schools receive.
A low grade also can detract from a neighborhood and drive homebuyers elsewhere.
Bennett, who now is reworking Florida's grading system as that state's education commissioner, reviewed the emails Monday morning and denied that DeHaan's school received special treatment. He said discovering that the charter would receive a low grade raised broader concerns with grades for other "combined" schools ? those that included multiple grade levels ? across the state.
"There was not a secret about this," he said. "This wasn't just to give Christel House an A. It was to make sure the system was right to make sure the system was face valid."
However, the emails clearly show Bennett's staff was intensely focused on Christel House, whose founder has given more than $2.8 million to Republicans since 1998, including $130,000 to Bennett and thousands more to state legislative leaders.
Other schools saw their grades change, but the emails show DeHaan's charter was the catalyst for any changes.
Bennett rocketed to prominence with the help of former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and a national network of Republican leaders and donors, such as DeHaan. Bennett is a co-founder of Bush's Chiefs for Change, a group consisting mostly of Republican state school superintendents pushing school vouchers, teacher merit pay and many other policies enacted by Bennett in Indiana.
Though Indiana had had a school ranking system since 1999, Bennett switched to the A-F system and made it a signature item of his education agenda, raising the stakes for schools statewide.
Bennett consistently cited Christel House as a top-performing school as he secured support for the measure from business groups and lawmakers, including House Speaker Brian Bosma and Senate President Pro Tem David Long.
But trouble loomed when Indiana's then-grading director, Jon Gubera, first alerted Bennett on Sept. 12 that the Christel House Academy had scored less than an A.
"This will be a HUGE problem for us," Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12, 2012 email to Neal.
Neal fired back a few minutes later, "Oh, crap. We cannot release until this is resolved."
By Sept. 13, Gubera unveiled it was a 2.9, or a "C."
A weeklong behind-the-scenes scramble ensued among Bennett, assistant superintendent Dale Chu, Gubera, Neal and other top staff at the Indiana Department of Education. They examined ways to lift Christel House from a "C'' to an "A," including adjusting the presentation of color charts to make a high "B'' look like an "A'' and changing the grade just for Christel House.
It's not clear from the emails exactly how Gubera changed the grading formula, but they do show DeHaan's grade jumping twice.
"That's like parting the Red Sea to get numbers to move that significantly," Jeff Butts, superintendent of Wayne Township schools in Indianapolis, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
DeHaan, who opened the Christel House Academy charter school in Indianapolis in 2002 and has since opened schools in India, Mexico and South Africa, said in a statement Monday that no one from the school ever made any requests that would affect Christel House's grades.
Current Indiana schools chief Glenda Ritz's office declined comment on the emails.
Ritz, a Democrat, defeated Bennett in November with a grass-roots campaign driven by teachers angered by Bennett's education agenda.
Bennett said Monday he felt no special pressure to deliver an "A'' for DeHaan. Instead, he argued, if he had paid more attention to politics he would have won re-election in Indiana.
Yet Bennett wrote to staff twice in four days, directly inquiring about DeHaan's status. Gubera broke
the news after the second note that "terrible" 10th grade algebra results had "dragged down their entire school."
Bennett called the situation "very frustrating and disappointing" in an email that day.
"I am more than a little miffed about this," Bennett wrote. "I hope we come to the meeting today with solutions and not excuses and/or explanations for me to wiggle myself out of the repeated lies I have told over the past six months."
Bennett said Monday that email expressed his frustration at having assured top-performing schools like DeHaan's would be recognized in the grading system, but coming away with a flawed formula that would undo his promises.
When requested a status update Sept. 14, his staff alerted him that the new school grade, a 3.50, was painfully close to an "A." Then-deputy chief of staff Marcie Brown wrote that the state might not be able to "legally" change the cutoff for an "A."
"We can revise the rule," Bennett responded.
Over the next week, his top staff worked arduously to get Christel House its "A." By Sept. 21, Christel House had jumped to a 3.75. Gubera resigned shortly afterward.
He declined comment Monday.
The emails don't detail what Gubera changed in the school formula or how many schools were affected. Indiana education experts consulted for this article said they weren't aware the formula had been changed.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WISHTV_News/~3/oDmi9BCNaZk/gop-donors-school-grade-changed
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Monday, July 29, 2013
Initiation deaths in South Africa a health problem, doctor says
This is a grim time of year for a hospital in the rolling hills of South Africa?s Eastern Cape province, where mattresses are laid on floors to cope with the stream of young men with severe injuries from botched circumcisions at initiation ceremonies.
Some patients with amputations, a doctor says, were told by their handlers that their genitals would grow back, reflecting a fog of misinformation that makes it hard to stop what has become an annual health crisis.
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It wasn?t supposed to be this way. The traditional ritual, which goes back centuries, is meant to usher youths into manhood, inculcating them with the responsibilities to become valued members of their community. Former South African President Nelson Mandela wrote about the spiritual meaning of his own circumcision in the same province where the Holy Cross Hospital is struggling to handle the influx of wounded males.
At least 60 males have died at initiation schools in eastern South Africa since the start of the initiation season in May, health officials confirmed. Thirty of them died in the Eastern Cape in the last six weeks, and 300 others were hospitalized with injuries.
Dingeman Rijken, a doctor at Holy Cross Hospital, has treated so many cases that he is campaigning for better practices at the ceremonies, circulating a training manual that calls for proper medical precautions. The manual contains graphic images of circumcisions and offers an ideal method of performing the procedure, which he?s shared with people involved in initiation ceremonies around Eastern Cape?s Pondoland region.
?It is becoming a psychological issue,? said Rijken, who has treated 140 initiates in the last year and admitted another 150 for serious injuries. ?I have had to tell eight boys this season that they?ve lost their glans or parts of their penis, so it is a health problem. We can?t run away from it, we need to address it.?
He said nurses struggle to keep up with the overflow of more than 68 initiates who were admitted in the last two weeks with badly infected genitals, dehydration or other serious injuries.
The worst of the injuries occurred after botched circumcisions performed by inexperienced traditional nurses, who use the same spear on multiple initiates without protecting against the spread of infections, then cover up wounds with tightly wrapped bandaging that cuts off blood supply to the area. After about 10 hours the genitals can become gangrenous and in some cases permanently damaged, but many initiates do not seek hospital treatment for another five to 10 days, Rijken said.
By this time very little can be done. Doctors cannot perform surgery because initiates suffer from sleep deprivation and dehydration and are not in a condition to give consent.
In minor cases, Rijken cleans off loose gangrenes around the affected area, bandages it and treats it with antibiotics, which eventually may result in a partial amputation of the penis. In more serious incidents, boys wait a period of one to six weeks until the entire organ falls off, he says.
Initiations are mostly practiced, though not exclusively, by the Xhosa tribe in eastern South Africa. Young males participate in the ritual as a formal preparation for adulthood, usually undergoing circumcision and survival tests in secluded sites outside their communities.
Most of the deaths in the Eastern Cape were in Pondoland, where the practice was banned in the 1820s by its then ruler, and then reintroduced in the last three decades as men who left their communities to work in mine fields were ostracized because they were not considered men if they were not circumcized, Rijken said, citing his research of its history.
Government legislation stipulates that participants should be at least 18, but parents can sign a consent allowing younger boys to participate. Rijken has monitored more than 60 ceremonies and rescued several injured boys, and says he sees initiates mostly between ages 14 and 17, but has treated boys as young as 12 who are too young to understand the implications of losing their male organ.
He said initiates rarely complain about pain because they fear being beaten by nurses and ridiculed by peers for not properly observing a tradition that encourages initiates to develop a tough demeanour. One patient had part of his injured penis ?yanked off? as punishment for complaining, and those who suffer penile amputations are frequently told by handlers that their penises would grow back, Rijken said.
?But that?s why we need to involve the community, to tell them it won?t grow back,? he said.
Like others who have spoken about the long-held tradition, Rijken believes it will take the combined effort of traditional leaders, provincial health departments and effective government regulation to end the killings and save the cultural practice, but he said it?s time the community is educated on the dangers.
?At a certain point if you see so many boys are dying, then it?s time to talk about it,? he said. ?We want people to do away with the secrecy and get the community involved.?
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