The Cow in the Room: 30 Years at Loisaba

In 1992, a young livestock manager named Tom Silvester arrived at Loisaba, a cattle ranch in Northern Kenya with a few hundred head, one old Land Rover and a payroll of about twenty-five people.

Not long after, he was shown a skull — the last black rhino to walk this land before it was poached out in the 1970s. Thirty years on Tom’s still there, running Loisaba Conservancy, what many consider to be one of the finest conservation trusts in the world — 58,000 acres that is home to cattle, elephants, lions, a community of hundreds and, once again, rhinos.

Bringing the latter back took five years of political negotiation and a translocation by truck. The first night nearly ended it all when a newly arrived female was attacked by lions before she’d got fifty metres of the truck. Rangers stood guard over her until dawn, uncertain if the whole effort would collapse. She survived and went on to have a calf.

Two years later, there are now twenty-nine black rhinos on Loisaba, eight that have been born there. I spoke with Tom about what it costs to run a place like this, and about the long, slow work behind the rhino story, as well as the shift from a private family ranch to a Kenyan trust, the grazing arrangements Tom has kept with Samburu and Maasai neighbours, and a herd of over a thousand cattle he manages on their behalf under a fattening scheme — because as he puts it, you don’t do anything about anything in northern Kenya without a cow in the room.

The Cow in the Room: On Building a Conservancy in Northern Kenya drops Tuesday September 1 on All That I Have Met, wherever you get your podcasts.