A Summary Of Amy Dickman's Fight From The Barabaig '

It was late evening and Amy Dickman was walking through the bush to a household she suspected was celebrating a lion kill.

"It was dark but I suddenly got the feeling I was being watched," Dickman recalls. "I was concerned that a big cat might be lying in wait."

For a brief moment the moon appeared from behind the clouds, illuminating the landscape.

"I realised I was surrounded by young men carrying spears. Then it went dark again. I was terrified," she says.

This was Dickman's first encounter with warriors from the Barabaig - a community with a history of killing non-Barabaig people and still widely feared.

A conservation biologist from Devon, Dickman has been running a big carnivores project in Ruaha, southern Tanzania, since 2009.
Killing a lion provided a warrior with both wealth and status.

"We had found a lot of lion carcasses with the right paw cut off," Dickman says.

"It turns out warriors take the central claw to the witchdoctor who agrees a price in cattle that they can collect from nearby households. They can get around 20 cattle for one lion, which is worth $4,000."

Dickman began collecting data on the number of lion kills and was staggered by the results.

"In 2011, 37 lions were killed around just one village we were working in. That was equivalent to half the wild lions trophy-hunted across the whole of Africa in a year."

When Dickman first arrived in southern Tanzania she found there was just a small pop-up tent to sleep in.

It had been placed on the trail hippos used to reach water, so she moved it away from the river to avoid being trampled, and assumed she would be safe.

"But on my first night a male lion came sniffing around my tent," she says.

She grabbed a deodorant and pocket knife in case she had to defend herself, but at that point the lion just lay down on the tent, trapping her arm.

"I was terrified. I thought it was going to eat me. Then I realised it had fallen asleep," she
"We are saying, 'If you want extra benefits, the way to get them is to protect the wildlife better,'" Dickman says.

The project seems to be working. Livestock killings have fallen by 60% and lion killings by 80% over a five-year period.

They currently work with 10 villages but plan to expand it to all 22 that adjoin the park. But for that they will need more money.

"There isn't a meaningful way to make the project self-sustaining as these communities wouldn't be the ones benefitting from tourism," Dickman says.

"However, if we consider lions to be part of our global heritage then we need to fund this. We can't expect people on less than $1 a day to pay the price."

Dickman now splits her time between Tanzania, the US, where she raises funds, and the UK, where she has a husband and a two-year-old daughter.

"The hardest part of my job is being away from my daughter Millie, but I know I'm making a difference," Dickman says.

"People don't realise how at risk lions are. They have halved in the past 20 years and there are now fewer than 25,000 left. Their fate hangs in the balance."

Dickman says she will never lose her wonder of big