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Darkness falls in Kenya, Africa. The villagers are getting ready to go to sleep. Their cows rest in a wooden pen outside. All is quiet.

Snap! A twig breaks. Something is coming. It's a female lion. The lioness pounces on the pen. She rips through its walls. The cows scatter.

The villagers hear the noise and run outside. One cow is dead. The lioness is gone. The sounds made by the villagers scared her away.

The lioness returns to her pride. Her two cubs rub their faces against hers. She answers them with a low rumble. She needs to hunt again. Her cubs are hungry.

Lions are top predators. No other animal hunts them. They prey on livestock like cows, sheep, and goats.

The villagers are part of the Maasai people. Maasai need their livestock. To them, farm animals are like money. They use their animals to buy what they need. When lions attack, the Maasai try to kill the lions.

Today lion killing is a big problem. The number of people living in Kenya is growing. They are moving into areas where lions live. So the lions' habitat is getting smaller. The lions and humans are getting closer. That puts them both in danger.

In the past, lions lived all over Earth. Now most lions live only in parts of Africa and India. There may be only 20,000 lions left in the wild. If nothing is done to help, lions could die out, or become extinct.

Lions help keep life balanced in their environment. They prey on other animals. If the lions disappear, life in their environment would change. Other animals could be in trouble, too.

That's why the National Geographic Society wants to protect lions. It gives money to people like Anne Kent Taylor who have ideas to help lions.

Taylor lives near the Maasai people. She knows the Maasai don't kill lions for fun. They only want to protect their livestock.

Taylor also knows lions don't kill livestock for fun. They kill to feed their pride. She wants to protect both lions and livestock.

There's only one way to protect both lions and livestock. They must be kept apart.

Maasai herders build round pens called bomas. Their livestock sleep in these pens. Bomas are made from thorny branches. A boma may seem like a safe place. It isn't.

Sometimes lions claw through them. Other times they leap over the branches to attack the animals inside.

Taylor studied the bomas. She found a better way to build them. The herders used Taylor's idea. They hammered long nails into the branches that make up the boma. They wrapped a tall wire fence around the branches. The nails hold the wire in place.

The lions couldn't jump over the wire. They couldn't claw through, either. Finally, they gave up and left. The farm animals were safe!

Taylor's idea began to spread. More Maasai put wire fences around their bomas. The fence kept lions out. It kept other predators out, too.

Leopards used to climb the boma branches and jump in. When herders began adding wire to their bomas, the leopards stopped. They didn't like the wire. It spooked them.

The wire also stops hyenas. Taylor learned that hyenas kill more livestock than lions do. They follow lions into bomas. Now that the lions can't break into the new pens, hyenas shouldn't be able to, either.

Hyenas don't always wait for lions to do the work. One night, a herder woke up to hear his sheep and goats crying. It sounded like they were under attack. He raced to his boma.

He had built his boma in an open field. There wasn't much wood around. So he spaced out the few branches he found. He stretched the wire fence around them.

Now a clan of hyenas was running toward the fence. They didn't see the wire. Wham! They hit the fence and fell back. They charged again and again. Finally, they gave up and left.

Taylor felt good about her idea. The wire fences seemed to work. Lions had stopped attacking livestock. Herders had stopped killing lions. Then something bad happened.

One morning a herder's livestock had been attacked. The boma had a wire fence around it. No lion, leopard, or hyena could have gotten in.

What happened was a mystery. Then Taylor spotted a small creature. It was trying to dig into another boma. The wire fence had been buried in the ground. The animal couldn't dig under it.

The animal was a honey badger. Honey badgers have long claws for digging. They can dig under the branches. That's how the badger got through to the livestock.

Taylor told the herders to bury their wire fence deep into the ground. After that, no animals got through. Not even honey badgers.

Putting wire fences around bomas helps both lions and herders. Now herders don't have to kill lions to protect their animals. Yet lions are not out of danger. They still may become extinct. Only people working together can help to save them.

Article by Joe Levit.