Ngorongoro Conservation Unit: Correspondence with New Scientist 1962

The great Serengeti game plains of Tanganyika have become a testing ground for conservation theories. After four years of tedious and to a great extent unprofitable negotiation between the local Government, its departments and various international conservation groups, the plains and the volcanoes to the southeast of them were split up into a reserve for the animals and what is ironically described as a "Conservation Unit for the Masai Pastoralists, Between them under the new plan lies a "Corridor" of bush country with permanent water running westward towards Lake Victoria. The arrangement has never worked satisfactorily because, as Professor V.H.Pearsall pointed out when he surveyed the area for the Fauna Preservation Society in 1956, both the wild and domesticated animals want precisely the same thing: nutritious grasses and water. And there is precious little of either available Since the Pearsall report, the plains have been surveyed by various groups from the Germans (under Grzimek of Frankfurt) 'to the Americans who have subsidized various enterprises. From the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome last week came news of yet another survey.