Nature trips best way for children to appreciate wildlife

By Irene Amoke

Kenya: The zoologist in me was seething with indignation (and a respectable amount of shock) when the breakfast presenters of a popular morning radio show casually rubbished nature related school outings.

To them, school kids are better off admiring the wonder that is our Thika super highway or visiting one of our corporate giants, Safaricom, than spending a day at the National Museum/snake park or Nairobi Safari Walk.

Irresponsible talk

According to them, all things nature, especially our wildlife, are best enjoyed within the four walls of a classroom through National Geographic DVDs. How irresponsible is that, really?

It boggles the mind that children should be discouraged from appreciating Kenya’s God-given nature by people who should know better. When you mention Kenya to people from other countries, the responses usually revolve around our natural assets.

We have been called a land of contrasts and that’s no cliché — we are blessed with fascinating and diverse landscapes.

Where else in the world do you find pristine beaches and coral reefs, a snow capped mountain straddling the equator (and fantastic views of another), arid desert lands, tropical forests, amazing views of the Great Rift, lakes filled with birdlife and a vast savannah teeming with wildlife all in one country?

So it is correct to say that our claim to fame as a country, our political inclinations and athletes aside, is our beautiful land.

Now I have nothing against corporate Kenya or the service industry or the fact that our infrastructure is growing at an amazing rate.

I applaud our innovations and back the call to have school children visit companies and understand how to produce a commercial. However, we need to ask ourselves, how many of these children will actually end up working in corporate Kenya?  Currently, both agriculture and tourism, which revolve around our natural environment, employ about 80 per cent of Kenya’s population.

Go out

How many of these people or the public schools in the boondocks have access to NatGeo DVDs? And if they do have access to them, why would you choose to spend three hours in a classroom watching David Attenborough, great as he is, describe the happenings in your backyard to you? Why not go out, see and learn about those snakes, trees, insects and elephants first hand?

Many Kenyan schoolchildren, and adults to be frightfully honest, only get to see the wildlife that tourists to our country wax lyrical about during these school trips that are thought unnecessary.

It was especially disheartening to hear these comments at a time when Kenya is struggling with poaching and there are resounding calls from conservationists and wildlife experts for more awareness and appreciation by the public to issues affecting our wildlife, that the very medium that should be used to spread this message instead brushes it aside. Heck, Obama, Clinton and DiCaprio are shouting from the rooftops about the importance of wildlife!

I am a zoologist whose love affair with wildlife started during such a school trip to the Animal Orphanage on Langata Road some 20 years ago.

That trip was the start of a journey that led to a wildlife related PhD, and though it is not the most lucrative of careers, it fills me with a sense of national duty and pride to be able to talk about and live off our beautiful land.

So in this jubilee year, I would respectfully urge all Kenyans to make that half day trip to the orphanage, national park, museums or drive through the countryside and see our country through the eyes of a tourist and appreciate those things that make Kenya what it is to the rest of the world — a land of remarkable contrasts.

The writer is an Oxford Brookes University-trained ecologist.