Saving the Rhino but Losing the Herd? The Emerging Crisis for Southern Africa’s Plains Game

Introduction

Over the past three decades, Africa’s rhinoceroses have become one of conservation’s greatest success stories. Faced with relentless poaching and the prospect of extinction, rhinos have attracted unprecedented public attention, political commitment and financial investment. Intensive protection, sophisticated anti-poaching operations and sustained international fundraising have rescued many populations from the brink and demonstrated what determined conservation action can achieve.

Yet while the world’s attention has rightly focused on saving one of Africa’s most iconic animals, another wildlife crisis has unfolded largely unnoticed. Across much of southern Africa, populations of the antelope and other herbivores collectively known as plains game, including impala, kudu, sable, roan, tsessebe, waterbuck, reedbuck and eland, have been quietly declining in many free-ranging landscapes. Their losses rarely make international headlines, inspire major fundraising campaigns or attract significant conservation funding, despite the fact that these species form the ecological foundation of the African savanna.

This imbalance matters because plains game are far more than simply another group of animals. They shape vegetation, recycle nutrients, disperse seeds and provide the prey base that sustains Africa’s great predators. When their numbers fall, the consequences reverberate throughout entire ecosystems, threatening biodiversity, wildlife tourism, sustainable hunting and the ecological integrity of the landscapes themselves.

This article explores the growing evidence that many free-ranging plains game populations are entering a period of significant decline. It examines the ecological and human pressures driving these losses, asks why they have received so little attention compared with high-profile species such as rhinos, and considers what can still be done to prevent one of Africa’s most important but least recognised conservation crises. In many communal lands, forest reserves and poorly protected wildlife areas, antelope species that were once abundant have become increasingly scarce. Some populations have disappeared altogether, while others survive only in isolated pockets.

The reasons are many and closely intertwined. Expanding human populations, agricultural development, illegal hunting, habitat fragmentation, prolonged droughts, livestock encroachment, disease and weak wildlife governance all exert pressure on wild herbivore populations. At the same time, intensive conservation efforts on private wildlife estates have demonstrated that, under the right conditions, many species can recover remarkably quickly. This striking contrast between success and decline offers valuable lessons for conservation across the region.

This article examines what scientists have learned about the changing fortunes of Africa’s plains game. It explores the major drivers behind these population changes, consider their ecological consequences, and discuss the management strategies that offer the greatest hope for reversing current declines.

What does “Plains Game” mean?

The term plains game is not a strict scientific definition but is widely used throughout southern Africa to describe the medium and large herbivorous mammals that inhabit the region’s savannas, woodlands and floodplains. The group includes familiar species such as impala, greater kudu, blue wildebeest, Burchell’s zebra, waterbuck, bushbuck, eland, sable, roan, tsessebe, hartebeest, warthog, reedbuck, duiker and steenbok. Together, these herbivores form one of the richest assemblages of large mammals anywhere in the world, influencing vegetation structure, nutrient cycling, predator populations and the overall health of the ecosystems they occupy.

Historically, immense herds of these animals ranged across southern Africa, moving seasonally through landscapes that stretched from Angola and Zambia to South Africa. Today those migrations have largely disappeared, and while some protected areas continue to support thriving populations, many formerly productive wildlife landscapes have become increasingly fragmented.

Understanding why some populations are prospering while others continue to decline is one of the central challenges facing modern wildlife conservation.

People often generalize these trends as a uniform collapse across the continent of Africa. Rigorous ecological literature, however, paints a far more complicated picture of regional differences, disease-driven fluctuations, and complex human-wildlife interactions. This article synthesizes the scientific research to trace the historical trajectories of sub-Saharan plains game populations and examine the primary ecological and systemic mechanisms driving their redistribution and decline.

​The Historical Baseline: Disease and Rinderpest Recovery in the Serengeti

​To contextualize modern population declines, ecologists must look back to the earliest quantitative baselines. The seminal, multi-decade body of research led by Anthony Sinclair, Simon Mduma, and their collaborators from the University of British Columbia provides the historical benchmark for large mammal population dynamics in East Africa.

​The historical trajectory of the Serengeti ecosystem illustrates how a single biological event can reshape an entire continent’s wildlife baseline. In 1889, a catastrophic wildlife pandemic arose from the introduction of the rinderpest virus (a highly contagious viral disease affecting even-toed ungulates such as cattle, goats and antelope) via imported domestic cattle. Within less than a decade, rinderpest eradicated an estimated 90% of the wild wildebeest and African buffalo populations across East Africa. By 1900, the Serengeti wildebeest population was suppressed to a historical low of roughly 200,000 individuals.

Fig 1: Historical Serengeti Wildebeest Population Path (Sinclair et al., 2000)

For the first sixty years of the 20th Century, the wildebeest population remained suppressed at this artificial ceiling due to repeated outbreaks of rinderpest that killed the majority of young wildebeest annually. It was not until the early 1960s, following a well-funded, systematic veterinary intervention that successfully vaccinated domestic cattle across adjacent communal lands, that wild ungulates were released from this top-down disease constraint.

​Sinclair’s systematic aerial-transect monitoring captured an extraordinary phase of exponential ecological change. The migratory wildebeest herd surged from approximately 200,000 animals in 1961 to over 1.2 million by 1977. Buffalo populations followed an identical trajectory. Upon reaching this ceiling, the population growth curve for both species flattened and shifted into a classic, density-dependent stabilization model dictated by dry-season forage availability which is a classic bottom-up regulation mechanism.

​The Sinclair datasets provide a vital warning to conservation policy-makers: historical baselines are routinely distorted by human actions. What casual observers might classify as an unprecedented modern wildlife “explosion” or “overpopulation” may actually reflect an ecosystem returning to its natural, long-term equilibrium following the removal of a disease barrier caused by human activities.

​Macro-Trends: Quantifying the Continental Decline

​While specific, hyper-protected ecosystems like the greater Serengeti-Mara have maintained robust wildlife numbers, broader studies show a far more precarious situation in Africa as a whole. The most comprehensive, large-scale quantitative assessment of these long-term trends is the landmark study conducted by Craigie et al. (2010), published in Biological Conservation.

​Craigie and his research team constructed a multi-species index designed to calculate percentage changes in abundance between 1970 and 2005. (The study used a huge database of 583 population abundance time series [1]spanning 69 large mammal species across 78 state-sanctioned African Protected Areas). The overarching conclusion of this deep scientific assessment was clear: on average, large mammal populations within Africa’s protected areas declined by 59% over the 35-year analysis window.

[1] A population abundance time series tracks the number of individuals of a specific species in a given area over consecutive time intervals (e.g., years, months). It captures the changing size or density of an animal or plant population, revealing trends like growth, decline, or cyclical fluctuations. Ecologists and biologists use these chronological datasets to understand how species interact with their environment, assess extinction risks, and measure the impacts of conservation efforts.

​Crucially, the Craigie et al. study exposed radical regional differences that invalidate any blanket statement regarding continental wildlife trends:

West Africa (-85% Net Change)

​The protected areas of West Africa experienced catastrophic, near-total collapses of their large herbivore populations. This regional failure was caused by severe institutional collapses, under-funded parks, and rampant, commercialized bushmeat exploitation within small, geographically isolated “protected areas” surrounded by high-density human populations.

East Africa (-52% Net Change)

​East African parks experienced severe, steady declines. Despite generating significant ecotourism revenues, these state parks have suffered from severe agricultural encroachment along their un-fenced perimeters, fracturing historical wet-season migration routes and converting critical buffer zones into intensive maize cultivation.

Southern Africa (+24% Net Change)

​In stark contrast to the rest of the continent, protected areas across South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia recorded a net population increase. This positive trajectory is the direct product of distinct structural, financial, and legal frameworks, including:

• ​Extensive, perimeter-fenced reserve networks that minimize human-wildlife edge conflicts.
• ​Statutory legal frameworks (such as Zimbabwe’s Parks and Wildlife Act of 1975 which has just been updated in an Amended form) that transferred wildlife ownership and user rights from the state to private landowners and local communities.
• ​The subsequent development of a robust private game ranching, photographic safari, and sustainable trophy hunting sector that monetised plains game and converted wildlife from an agricultural liability into a highly profitable land-use asset.

It is very important, however, to register that Craigie and his colleagues published the results of their research in 2010 and it seems possible that if the survey was repeated in 2026 it might well appear that corruption and weak governance, agricultural encroachment and bush meat poaching are posing grave threats to plains game populations in southern Africa.

Zimbabwe provides a representative example. Repeated aerial surveys over the Zambezi Valley and surrounding communal lands have documented declining populations of sable, eland, kudu and waterbuck associated with increasing settlement, poaching, and habitat degradation (Dunham et al., 2020).

Rangeland Competition and the Loss of Connectivity

​To identify the drivers behind the 52% decline recorded across East Africa, scientists point to an exhaustive, landscape-scale study published by Ogutu et al. (2016) in PLOS ONE. This research evaluated nearly four decades of systematic aerial monitoring survey data gathered by Kenya’s Directorate of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing (DRSRS) between 1977 and 2016, covering roughly 88% of Kenya’s hyper-arid and semi-arid rangelands.

​Ogutu et al. documented a devastating 68% average decline in wild herbivore abundance across the entire Kenyan rangeland, occurring both inside and outside state-managed national parks. When broken down into individual plains game species, the numbers revealed an immediate threat to long-term demographic viability:

• ​Thomson’s Gazelle: Suffered population reductions exceeding 70%.
• ​Impala: Declined by more than 75%.
• ​Wildebeest: Fell by over 73% across non-migratory resident populations.
• ​ Tsessebe, Hartebeest and Eland: Suffered precipitous declines ranging between 72% and 88%.

​Ogutu and his team made an important simultaneous study of domestic livestock trends over the same 40-year period. While cattle numbers decreased by 25.2% due to severe, climate-induced drought cycles, the populations of highly adaptive, close-grazing small stock, i.e. sheep and goats, exploded by 76.3%, supplemented by notable increases in domestic camels.

Fig 2: Shift in Rangeland Biomass Ratios (1977 vs. 2013)

This dramatic inversion of declining wildlife numbers and increasing domestic animal numbers demonstrates that the “disappearance” of plains game across East African savannas is driven by systematic ecological displacement. Wild ungulates are being progressively outcompeted for primary forage and water resources by heavily managed livestock herds. This pressure is compounded by the widespread installation of low-cost, high-tensile wire fencing across communal lands, which physically fragments rangelands, blocks dry-season wildlife movements and permanently separates plains game from traditional grazing areas

Causes of Decline in Plains Game Numbers in Zimbabwe

The causes of the decline in plains game in Zimbabwe have much in common with situations mentioned above and can be summarised as:

• Habitat Loss and Fragmentation:

Habitat loss is one of the most important drivers of plains game scarcity. Expanding agriculture, urbanisation, mining, fencing, road construction and infrastructure development reduce both habitat area and connectivity. Large herbivores require extensive home ranges to track seasonal forage availability. Woodland clearing also removes browse species essential for kudu, giraffe, bushbuck and eland.

 Fragmented landscapes disrupt these natural movements, reducing carrying capacity and creating isolated wildlife populations that experience:

• Reduced genetic diversity
• Restricted seasonal movements
• Higher mortality from human interactions
• Human population growth

Southern Africa’s rapidly growing rural populations have increased pressure on wildlife habitats. Expansion of subsistence farming into wildlife areas results in:

• Woodland clearance
• Firewood collection
• Livestock grazing
• Charcoal production
• Increased human-wildlife conflict
• Pressure to feed families with bush meat.

As wildlife habitat becomes increasingly occupied by people, herbivore populations become isolated into smaller protected areas.

Illegal Hunting/Poaching

Lindsey et al. (2013) identified bushmeat poaching as the greatest immediate threat to wildlife populations across much of southern Africa outside intensively protected reserves. Unlike elephant or rhinoceros poaching, most plains game poaching is driven by bushmeat demand.

Wire snares are particularly destructive because they:

• Capture animals indiscriminately
• Operate continuously
• Injure non-target species
• Reduce numbers of reproductive adults

Livestock Competition

As Ogutu and his team found in East Africa livestock numbers have expanded considerably across southern Africa. Competition occurs through:

• Forage depletion
• Water competition
• Disease transmission
• Habitat degradation

Heavy livestock grazing reduces grass biomass available for plains game. It also promotes bush encroachment in some ecosystems while increasing soil erosion in others.

Climate Change

Climate change is becoming an increasingly important driver of wildlife scarcity. Southern Africa has experienced increasing temperatures, more frequent droughts, altered rainfall timing and increased fire frequency. Drought reduces forage quality, decreases juvenile survival and lowers reproductive success. Species occupying semi-arid ecosystems, including sable and roan antelope, appear particularly vulnerable. Repeated drought years may reduce herbivore populations below recovery thresholds.

Disease

Disease outbreaks periodically reduce plains game populations, as seen above in the rinderpest epidemic. Important diseases that affect plains game include anthrax, bovine tuberculosis, foot-and-mouth disease and malignant catarrhal fever.  Transmission between livestock and wildlife has become increasingly important where domestic cattle share grazing with wild herbivores.

Predator Dynamics

Predation is a natural ecological process and healthy predator populations are essential components of functioning ecosystems. However, where herbivore populations have already been reduced through habitat loss or poaching, predators may further reduce recovery. Small, isolated populations of sable, roan and tsessebe are particularly vulnerable because reproduction becomes insufficient to replace adult mortality.

Fire Regimes

Fire strongly influences southern African savannas. Annual late dry-season fires often remove nutritious grass before herbivores can utilise it. Conversely, suppression of fire may encourage woody encroachment that reduces grazing opportunities.

​The Conservation Funding Paradox: Charismatic Bias vs. Biodiversity

​The alarming trends documented by Craigie et al. (2010) and Ogutu et al. (2016) pose a fundamental question: why have international conservation strategies failed to halt the decline of these foundational herbivore populations?

The answer lies in a fundamental problem within international conservation economics: the extreme concentration of funding on “charismatic megafauna” specifically apex predators such as lions, and high-profile elephants at the absolute expense of the apparently less exciting and dramatic plains game.

​The Dynamics of Charismatic Asymmetry

​In international philanthropic markets and corporate-NGO ecosystems, capital allocation is heavily driven by public perception and marketing viability, rather than objective ecological priority rankings. This phenomenon is extensively documented in conservation literature as “charismatic bias” (Guénard et al., 2022).

A 25-year comprehensive analysis of global conservation grant allocations discovered that over 82.9% of all international funding was directed exclusively toward vertebrates, with mammals and birds securing an astonishing 85% of that sub-total (Guénard et al., 2022).

Crucially, nearly 94% of all species explicitly identified as threatened by the IUCN received zero financial support, because funding was concentrated on a narrow, highly photogenic group of large game.

​In sub-Saharan Africa, this bias manifests as a hyper-focus on apex carnivores such as lions, leopards, cheetah, and African wild dog. International non-governmental organizations rely on these flagship species to drive retail donor subscription models, marketing dollars and field grants flow along taxonomic lines.

A lion or wild dog tracking project, equipped with satellite collars and dedicated research vehicles, can secure millions of dollars in international funding, while a rangeland rehabilitation project designed to prevent bush encroachment or manage rotational grazing for a disappearing population of hartebeest or tsessebe struggles for baseline operational capital.

​The Breakdown of the Umbrella Species Paradigm

​This lopsided funding model is historically justified by international donors via the “umbrella species” paradigm. The underlying theory claims that because large apex predators require massive home ranges to survive, funding directed at securing territories for a pride of lions inherently protects the entire ecological area, including the plains game, soils and vegetation.  Field research demonstrates, however, that the umbrella species model breaks down when facing complex, bottom-up rangeland degradation:

• ​Mismatched Spatial Scales of Threats: A well-funded carnivore research initiative can effectively reduce direct human-predator conflicts, such as retaliatory poisonings by local livestock owners. However, it lacks the legal power, financial scope, or mandate to address the macro-economic forces driving rangeland degradation outside park borders, such as sub-division of communal lands, international beef subsidies or illegal charcoal production.
• ​​Neglect of Primary Ecological Processes: When funding is concentrated at the apex of the food web, the foundational ecological processes that sustain the entire system are frequently left underfunded. Demanding rangeland maintenance tasks, such as implementing controlled burning regimes, mechanically clearing invasive bush species, managing artificial water points to prevent erosion, and combatting non-selective wire snare poaching, suffer from chronic capital shortage.
• ​Predator Collapse via Prey Depletion: The ironic consequence of this funding failure is that by ignoring the bottom-up requirements of plains game, conservationists jeopardize the very predators they are trying to save. Lions, leopards, and wild dogs cannot survive on protected status alone; they require high densities of medium-sized wild ungulates for their diet. When plains game populations collapse due to rangeland competition or unchecked commercial wire-snaring, the apex predator populations inevitably suffer due to prey depletion, regardless of how many individual collars have been funded.

​Quantifying the Continental Under-funding Crisis

​To fully evaluate whether predators are truly “over-funded,” this analysis must look at the total financial operational costs of African protected areas. The definitive study on this subject, led by Peter Lindsey and an international coalition of conservation economists published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (Lindsey et al., 2018), evaluated the operational budgets of 282 state and private protected areas encompassing lion populations across 23 sub-Saharan countries.

The study modelled the strict financial inputs required to effectively manage the relevant savanna areas, including costs for anti-poaching infrastructure, fence maintenance, community engagement and staff salaries. It established that protected areas require a minimum baseline investment of $1,000 to $2,000 per square kilometre annually to maintain ecological integrity and prevent the depletion of large mammal groups.

​The results of this financial assessment expose a staggering continental deficit:

• ​The total annual funding available across all 282 protected areas combined was a meagre $381 million.
• The average funding actually received on the ground was just $200 per square kilometre annually, representing a catastrophic 80% to 90% funding deficit across 88% of Africa’s lion-range parks.

​Only three countries across the sub-Saharan region, South Africa, Kenya, and Rwanda, recorded average protected area budgets that met or exceeded the minimum $1,000/km² operational threshold.

​In major wilderness states like Tanzania, Zambia, and Botswana, the average funding plummeted to less than $300 per square kilometre, leaving millions of hectares of wildlife habitat functionally unmanaged and vulnerable to rapid human encroachment.

Table 1: Protected Area Management Funding vs. Actual Needs (Lindsey et al., 2018)

These numbers reframe the debate around the charismatic funding asymmetry. Apex predators are not over-funded in an absolute sense; the reality is that most of the African conservation estate is trapped in a state of chronic, structural insolvency.

​The uneven allocation of funds occurs because the few dollars that are available from international sources naturally gravitate toward the most marketable, high-profile flagship species. Rather than reflecting an abundance of resources for carnivores, the funding skew is an emergency mechanism within a system that is fundamentally under-resourced.

​Future Solutions

​Historical and contemporary scientific literature demonstrates that the survival of sub-Saharan plains game cannot be achieved through traditional isolationist conservation tactics or purely predator-centric funding models. Static “paper parks” (protected areas that exist on legal maps but lack the operational capital to enforce anti-poaching laws, manage rangelands, or integrate with local human populations) invariably suffer from systematic defaunation.

​To reverse the disappearance of plains game and restore the ecological stability of the African savanna, institutional funding models must be radically restructured through three primary interventions:

• ​Holistic Landscape-Scale Grants

​International donor agencies, philanthropic foundations, and multilateral NGOs must turn away from narrow, taxon-specific funding mandates. Grants aimed at protecting apex predators should explicitly make their funding conditional on holistic, ecosystem-wide outcomes. For example, a grant designed for lion conservation must allocate specific, legally binding percentages toward securing the seasonal migration pathways of the plains game that the lions hunt, funding invasive bush clearing, and restoring degraded water catchments.

• ​Economically Devolving Wildlife Ownership to Communities

​As emphasized by the stark regional contrasts in the Craigie et al. (2010) data, wildlife populations stabilize or increase when they are converted from a community liability into an economic asset. If local pastoralists and agriculturalists living on the borders of national parks are legally excluded from the financial benefits of wildlife tourism, sport hunting, or sustainable harvesting, they will inevitably clear the land for domestic stock.

Cultivating community-managed conservancies, where local populations possess direct user rights and share in ecotourism revenues, provides immediate financial incentives to maintain open rangelands and protect wild ungulates from wire snaring.

This was, of course, the basis of Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE (Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) initiative. The CAMPFIRE project still exists and remains active, though. While celebrated as a groundbreaking community-based conservation model, it has faced decades of financial, political, and bureaucratic challenge and currently operates in a diminished, heavily challenged state compared to its peak in the 1990s

• ​Securing Absolute Funding Targets through Public-Private Partnerships

​Given that state budgets across most sub-Saharan nations cannot bridge the billion-dollar funding deficits identified by Lindsey et al. (2018), alternative governance models need to be expanded.

Co-management agreements and public-private partnerships – such as the model pioneered by non-profit management groups like African Parks Network – have demonstrated that combining international private capital with state sovereign authority can elevate under-funded parks up to the necessary $1,000/km² threshold. This infusion of capital guarantees the baseline infrastructure, such as regular anti-poaching patrols, veterinary disease control, and boundary management, needed to allow plains game populations to recover toward equilibrium.

​Conclusion

​The decline of plains game across sub-Saharan Africa represents a fundamental threat to the long-term viability of the continent’s ecosystems. From the historical lessons of the rinderpest pandemic recorded by Sinclair to the continental declines mapped by Craigie, and the fine-scale rangeland displacement quantified by Ogutu, the science indicates that wild herbivores are highly sensitive to both top-down biological shocks and bottom-up habitat fragmentation.

Resolving this crisis requires acknowledging that conservation is fundamentally intertwined with macro-economic realities. The historic emphasis on funding charismatic predators while neglecting foundational plains game creates an ecological house of cards. Only by establishing properly funded, landscape-scale rangeland management frameworks, and ensuring that local human communities derive measurable value from wild herds, can the iconic populations of the African plains be secured for future generations.

​References

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Editorial note: AI tools were used to assist with research and editing.