Ride ‘em cowboys

NAIROBI, Kenya — Masai 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 Masai departed for Arizona last week to learn how to merge ancient Kenyan traditions with modern American agronomy, reciprocation for a visit by a group of Arizona cowboys in 2002.

Ranchers from the Douglas, Ariz.-based Malpai Borderlands Group will be showing off the conservational and economic benefits of open rangelands when Masai from Kenya and Tanzania spend a week with them.

The Arizona ranchers traveled to Kenya in October 2002 and shared their experiences with the Masai, who like themselves 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 two groups meet.

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

“They live like Masai, but their environment is different. They do things according to the clock,” Mr. Petenya said. “Once a Masai 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 Masai and cowboys,” Mr. Petenya said.

The Malpai Borderlands Group’s ranch runs across Arizona and New Mexico along the border with Mexico. The Masai tribe, known for its spectacular jewelry and elaborate clothing, is also a border community, living in the savannas of southern Kenya and in neighboring northern Tanzania.

Like the Masai, the Malpai ranchers think of their herds when pondering the future, but also 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 (www.malpaiborderlandsgroup.org).

The Masai have learned over generations to coexist with wildlife and have turned that knowledge to their advantage by creating conservation areas.

One group, the Shompole Community Trust, noted that a trickle of tourists came soon after seeing the 1985 Oscar-winning “Out of Africa,” which was filmed partly on Shompole land.

The community built the Shompole Safari Lodge with the help of the African Conservation Center to raise much-needed cash from tourists eager to see lions, cheetahs, elephants and endangered African wild dogs.

Mr. 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 altogether.

When the Malpai ranchers subdivided their rangeland, which totals 800,000 acres, cattle overgrazed the smaller, 100-acre plots, which adversely affected the environment and the wildlife that had lived there. They eventually opened up 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, said Mr. Ndung’u of the African Conservation Center.