Lions and warriors: social factors underlying declining lion populations and incentive management

Hazzah, Borgerhoff Mulder, and Frank investigated the social and economic drivers of lion killing among Maasai communities near Amboseli, Kenya, and assessed an incentive-based compensation scheme. Through household interviews they identified attitudes, cultural killing traditions, livestock losses, and wealth as predictors of intent to kill lions. They found that retaliatory and ritual killing both contributed to declines and that compensation could reduce killing but risked moral hazard and inadequate funding. The study emphasised understanding heterogeneous community motivations rather than treating depredation alone as the cause, shaping later designs of socially informed coexistence programs in pastoralist landscapes.