Qualla: Nazinga Game Ranch

Nazinga Game Ranch: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marco Schmidt [1], CC BY-SA 3.0. The elephants came back first. In a region of southern Burkina Faso where poaching had nearly erased large wildlife from the landscape, herds of Loxodonta africana began reappearing in numbers that surprised even the biologists tracking them. Nazinga Game Ranch, a 94,000-hectare experiment launched by two Canadian brothers in 1979, was doing something that conservation orthodoxy said was impossible: proving that letting local communities hunt wildlife sustainably could save both the animals and the people who lived alongside them. For a decade, it worked brilliantly. Then it was taken away.

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Image: Marco Schmidt [1] | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nazinga Game Ranch: Brothers in the Savanna

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marco Schmidt [1], CC BY-SA 3.0. Clark and Robert Lungren grew up in what was then Upper Volta, watching cyclical drought devastate domesticated livestock while wild animals adapted and survived. Clark, who would spend most of his life in West Africa as a field biologist and bird specialist, became convinced tha...

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Image: Marco Schmidt [1] | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nazinga Game Ranch: Poachers into Gamekeepers

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marco Schmidt [1], CC BY-SA 3.0. The project's genius was its refusal to treat local people as the enemy. Using local labor, the Lungrens constructed dams, built over 600 kilometers of roads, and established an administrative base. They negotiated with subsistence farmers to relocate fields outside the ranch bou...

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Image: Marco Schmidt [1] | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nazinga Game Ranch: The Numbers That Defied Expectation

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefyguida, CC BY-SA 4.0. The results silenced the skeptics. Studies showed that wild animals tolerated drought far better than cattle, thrived on grasses and leaves that livestock derived little nutrition from, and did not cause erosion through overgrazing. They also produced more meat per kilogram of bo...

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Image: Stefyguida | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nazinga Game Ranch: Success as Downfall

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GranCastor, CC BY-SA 4.0. The ranch's very success attracted the forces that would undo it. International development funders wanted in. The healthy cash flow proved irresistible to officials in the capital. In 1989, a year before the project was scheduled to transition to national management on the Lungr...

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Image: GranCastor | CC BY-SA 4.0