Wildlife experts in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania - home to some of the world's largest populations of so-called "megafauna" - heaped scorn on the idea, saying it was at best fantasy and at worse a threat to local protection efforts and tourism.

Uganda Wildlife Authority chief Moses Mapesa gave the United States credit for proficiency in numerous areas of science and technology but said the suggestion published in this week's Nature magazine should be reconsidered.

"This sounds like fiction to me," he told AFP in Kampala. "The Americans are great people, they have gone to the moon, but I don't think that this is a great way to do things in conservation.

"They cannot start dreaming things in a new age," Mapesa said. "If they want to support and feel strongly as it sounds, they should support conservation work where it is."

Kenya Wildlife Service spokesman Edward Indakwa said the idea that the only way to save Africa's lions, cheetahs, elephants and rhinos was to move them to the United States was unrealistic and might be seen by some as theft.

"That is a romantic view," he told AFP in Nairobi. "Africa has well-established animal conservation parks and besides, America does not understand how to conserve some of these animals like the ones they are suggesting.

"These animals have been our heritage for centuries," Indakwa said. "If they once existed in the west and then became extinct, well, we are not ready to let go of our own."

Veteran Kenya-based conservationist Ian Douglas-Hamilton, chairman of Save the Elephants, called the proposal to create an American Serengeti in the US heartland "a terrible and absurd idea."

"Africa has done a lot more to conserve its large mammals than the United States," he told AFP. "If they want to preserve these animals, they should help Africa set up animal conservation sanctuaries in Africa itself, not America."

Tanzanian wildlife expert John Mwandu of the advocacy group Environcare shared that view, telling AFP in Dar es Salaam: "We are against mass exportation of wild animals to the US if that is what they want to do in creation of their Serengeti."

Elizabeth Wamba of the International Fund for Animal Conservation said US scientists should stick to animals native to their own continent if they wanted to preserve them.

"The idea could be taken as imaginative or creative but is unrealistic, pure fantasy," she said. "Generally, it is impossible to to recreate the African savanna in the US. No, it IS impossible."

The Director General of Tanzania's National Environmental Management Council, Magnus Ngoile, rejected the US scientists' premise that Africa's large mammals "are dying, stranded on a continent where wars are waged over scarce resources."

"In very few cases do soldiers hunt animals," he said, stressing that African people, not wildlife, were the prime casualties of conflicts on the continent.

Many critics of the proposal noted with disgust the scientists' view that their plan would generate tourism and boost depressed US local economies at a time when poverty reduction in Africa is purported to be a chief international concern.

Animal relocation would hit east Africa particularly hard, they said, noting the region's economy depends heavily on tourism revenue that would drop if potential North American visitors could stay at home to see exotic species in the wild.

"What they would be doing would be taking away from our most vital economic sector: tourism," said an official with the state-run Kenya Tourism Board.

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