Donald Ker

Donald Ker was a famous Kenyan white hunter, safari guide and conservationist of British descent. As a young man he teamed up Sydney Downey to create Ker and Downey Ltd., one of the first guide companies to transition from hunting to photographic safaris. He is also known for leading two long expeditions with Edgar Monsanto Queeny for the American Museum of Natural History which resulted in the production of several nature documentaries and in Ker's own dedication to conservation.

Early Years

When Ker was six years old his family moved to a coffee plantation in Kenya. He took to hunting early in his life and killed his first lion when still in his teens. Not much later he accompanied Denys Finch Hatton on a safari for the Prince of Wales.^[1] He soon joined the safari company Shaw and Hunter Ltd. It was while he worked for Shaw and Hunter that he first encountered Sydney Downey in the Masai Mara. In the beginning the two hunters developed a feud stemming from an incident when both were in the Mara at the same time, and felt the other’s hunting party was encroaching on theirs. As time passed the hunted together many times.^[2] Throughout the 1930s, the two hunters, Ker and Downey, opened up much of the Masai Mara to hunting.^[1]

Ker and Downey Ltd.

When WWII broke out in 1939 Ker enlisted with British army where he became a scout and partook in campaigns against the Italians in the Ethiopian theater. After the city of Addis Abbaba was reclaimed by the British legend has it that he met Downey at a bar, and that their plans to form their own safari company took root in that bar during an "impromptu meeting of the East African Professional Hunters" Association.^[1]

One of Ker's most notable clients was the businessman and naturalist Edgar Monsanto Queeny for whom he led two expeditions also associated with the American Museum of Natural History.^[3] Queeny intent was to audio record and film African wildlife and native culture, and produced several documentaries from the footage he took while with Ker, including Indicator Indicator and the Pagan Sudan. Ker and Queeny also worked hard to record the various sounds that lions make by playing back to the lions other lion and hyena sounds to illicit novel responses. In doing this Ker realized that the practice of playing recorded animal sounds to lions and other game "could be misused in hunting," and upon his return to Nairobi managed to get the Game department to amend the hunting laws banning such practices.^[4] This event exemplifies Ker's own growing conservationist tendencies. T that point, he and Downey were already leaning towards photographic safaris. Neither had enjoyed killing animals all that much to begin with, preferring instead the thrill of the chase.^[4]

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