Livestock mobility in sub-Saharan Africa: A critical review

Abstract

Livestock mobility is a complex concept holding many different meanings for observers of pastoralism. The movement of African pastoralists with their livestock has historically been seen by outsiders as working against both environmental and development goals. Recently, there has been an embrace of the logics of livestock mobility while uncertainties persist of what it means and how it could be measured. In this void, various unexamined associations circulate tying livestock mobility to features of pastoral cultures, ecologies, and institutions. We review the empirical literature that has sought to measure and document livestock mobility, comparing two parameters of its components: grazing and travel mobility. We find strong similarities of daily grazing movements of herds around base locations (camps, villages, water points) but wide variation in the seasonal travel movement between base locations. This variation reflects the fact that mobility is not a cultural norm but responds to the nutrition needs of livestock. The magnitude of travel mobility parameters is the highest for those transhumance systems moving along latitudinal and elevation gradients, thus moving across variation that is more predictable than is commonly presumed in the pastoral literature. The implications of the observed spatialities of livestock mobility for pastoral institutions are discussed.

Classification and characterisation of livestock production systems in northern Tanzania

“…It is therefore notable that over a quarter of cattle-keeping households in this cluster reported having not used transhumant grazing movements for cattle in the past 12 months, and more than one third of small ruminant keeping households of not using these movements for sheep or goats. It is well known that pastoral communities are undergoing rapid demographic, social, and economic shifts that are likely to influence practices around transhumance[48]. In particular, long-distance livestock movements that have traditionally been a response to variable grass and water availability have become increasingly difficult as a result of competing pressures on traditional grazing lands, including enclosure of previously communal land, conversion to crop lands, and for conservation [14,49–52].…”

A Framework to Tackling the Synchrony between Social and Ecological Phases of the Annual Cyclic Movement of Transhumant Pastoralism

“…For example, we acknowledge that this framework is based on environments with contrasting winter and summer seasons, which occur in regions located in high latitudes, as in the case of Patagonia, Argentina. As regions located in low latitudes may consider dry and wet seasons [48], instead of a photoperiodic driver, as contrasting situations that promote mobility, there are many other features to take into account [49]. On the one hand, access to ecological services such as water and forage, which are offered by winter-and summer-lands at different moments of the year (or dry and wet seasons in the tropics and subtropics), depends on many different social and environmental factors.…”

A putative genomic map for resistance ofBos indicuscattle in Cameroon to bovine tuberculosis

“…In addition, transhumance, the seasonal movement of livestock between pastures during the dry and wet season, practised by pastoralists in this region is dominated by native zebu breeds (Motta et al, 2018). Transhumance requires hardy, resilient and disease tolerant animals that can trek hundreds of miles along the Sahel transhumance highway (Motta et al, 2018; Turner and Schlecht, 2019). This limits the chances of breeding outside this gene pool since the characteristics targeted by breed improvements in most African settings are likely incompatible with the transhumance way of life.…”