How US President killed 9 hyenas, 17 lions in Kenya

Game hunting at Nairobi National Park in 1960s. [File, Standard]

During his presidential bid manifesto launch, Roots Party leader George Wajackoya suggested that Kenya should harvest and export wildlife products including hyena testicles and snake venom to pay off foreign debts.

His seemingly radical ideas have been met with skepticism and outright derision in some quarters.

Others have praised his "forward-looking" solutions to Kenya's ballooning debt problem. Curiously, Kenya Wildlife Service, the custodians of all wildlife in Kenya issued a statement in which it outlined the guidelines of snake farming here.

Wajackoya's suggestions, though comical, are nothing compared to the wanton slaughter of Kenya's wild animals in the early 20th Century in the name of sport. The most publicised of these forays into our wild areas was the 1909 visit to colonial Kenya by former US President Theodore Roosevelt.

Together with his son, Kermit, Roosevelt was responsible for popularising the term 'Big Five' that came to represent the most ferocious and difficult animals to kill.

During his visit, termed as a "conservation mission", Roosevelt killed over 500 animals. Of the Big Five, he bagged 17 lions, 11 elephants, 10 buffaloes, three leopards and 20 rhinos.

Included too were nine hyenas and 29 zebras. "Kermit and I kept about a dozen trophies for ourselves; otherwise we shot nothing that was not used either as a museum specimen or for meat," he wrote in Africa Game Trails.

Roosevelt, who had earned the nickname 'Bwana Tumbo' for his potbelly was happy to get out of the expedition alive. Some hunters were gored to death or maimed for life by the same quarry they were after.

Fritz Schindler, for example, was a big, Swiss game hunter who had bagged 60 lions despite his erratic shooting skills. After killing a lion, Schindler would walk up to the dead animal, cut a piece of the heart and eat it as he had been told by the local Maasai that it would give him more 'manly powers'. In 1914, while working on the Magadi railway, Schindler came across a wounded lion that mauled him so severely that his abdomen was slit open, dying days later in hospital.

George Grey, brother to future British foreign secretary Edward Grey, faced the same fate at the claws of a wounded lion in Athi plains. A local white farmer had pumped several bullets in the brute's abdomen, something that enraged the King of the Jungle further.

The lion badly lacerated Grey's body and he died shortly thereafter. His tomb, bearing the ominous sign 'Killed by a Lion' was among the best preserved at the old Nairobi cemetery at Bunyala Road-Uhuru Highway junction. Kenya banned trophy hunting in May 1977 with Tourism and Wildlife minister Matthew Ogutu ordering companies and individuals that held hunting concessions to convert their hunting trips into photographic safaris.