On the western flanks of Mount Kenya lies the Laikipia plateau, an achingly beautiful landscape that is both a refuge for wildlife and a home to traditional Masai communities. Black rhinos, which were once nearly extinct, are now thriving on some of these conservation properties, thanks to the intense efforts to keep them safe.

The new documentary Rhino tells the story of the people and the challenges faced to protect wildlife in this volatile landscape. The cinematography and score beautifully captures the landscape, people, animals and pace of life, which is at times languorous and at times frantic.

The story unfolds from the perspective of two rangers. Ramson Kiluko is an experienced ranger who works with his team to watch, protect and understand the rhinos. The film gives us a glimpse into his family life, the camaraderie of the ranger team and the rich knowledge he has about the lives of individual rhinos and their landscape. Rita Kulamu is a young ranger learning about rhinos as her property prepares to welcome them. Their work takes place against a background of danger, posed by both people and animals.

Rhino focuses on the critical role rangers play in the conservation story of black rhinos, which is an inspiring change from the traditional wildlife documentary that suggests a wildness that exists without the need for human intervention or involvement. Once on the brink of extinction, it is precisely the intensive efforts made to protect rhinos by people like Kiluko and Kulamu that has seen numbers slowly rebound.

A vehicle in the foreground, and further away a rhino.
The film focuses on the role of rangers in conserving rhinos. Tom Martienssen/Dustoff Films

The film loosely follows a narrative around the planned move of 21 rhinos from the Lewa and Borana reserves in central Kenya, where they are too numerous, to Loisaba – a 58,000 acre wildlife conservation area which has long been without rhinos.

On Lewa and Borana, the rhinos fight for space and territory, on Loisaba they have the opportunity to create a new breeding population. Moving rhinos between reserves is a core part of their conservation. Poaching pressures require rhinos to be fiercely guarded. In Kenya, where my team has carried out research to understand the factors that lead to successfully breeding rhino populations, rangers are tasked with finding each rhino every day. Fences that keep rhinos in and people out mean that rhinos cannot move to avoid threats, avoid inbreeding, or to reestablish populations where they no longer are found.

Moving rhinos is far from easy. They can be aggressive and need to be handled with care. Rhinos are also not very resilient to being moved between properties. These moves often lead to rhinos dying from fighting, stress and disease.

The film shows how extreme drought led to a delay of several years to try to maximise the success of the move . This widespread and prolonged drought caused intense suffering of humans, livestock and wildlife. Conflicts over animals and land boiled over, leading to violence between communities but also towards rangers. These day-to-day challenges faced by conservationists are rarely touched on. Hopefully this film will help audiences understand that there are legions of passionate conservation professionals behind every success story.

The new documentary covers how the black rhino were facing extinction.

However, there is much that the story doesn’t tell. My experience researching wildlife health and disease in this landscape has highlighted how critical it is to create solutions that benefit both nature and people. Laikipia is a complicated landscape, where land rights, land ownership and power inequalities create tensions, and even violence, between communities.

This is a landscape where settlers, European farmers that immigrated, appropriated the best, most productive beautiful lands from traditional communities. High-end conservation reserves manage landscapes that teem with wildlife but are often off limits to the people that once moved widely with their animals. Our conversations with local people suggest that they view rhino conservation as a Trojan horse, moved around to justify high fences, armed security and to restrict people’s movement.

Rhino portrays the situation in somewhat simplistic terms: the good rangers and the bad “bandits”. In reality, conservation sits at a much less clear cut interface between the haves and the have nots, between those with international and national support for protecting animals, and pastoralists, a traditional way of life where people move with their herds of animals across the land, who feel their rights and traditional lands have been taken from them and that the wild animals have more rights that they do.

Violence comes not just from evil, avaricious thieves, but sometimes from frustrated, desperate people who have to deal with too many animals on too little land. Rhino tells an interesting and valuable story, but true conservation success must also address inequality, disenfranchisement and the tensions that “parachute” and colonial conservation can create in local communities.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Susanne Shultz, University of Manchester

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Susanne Shultz and her group have received funding for their work in Laikipia from the Darwin Initiative, the International Science Partnership Fund, the University of Manchester, the Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council, and the Natural Environment Research Council.