Lee and Bond (2018) claim to quantify the ecological success of a community-based wildlife conservation intervention in Tanzania. In this reply to their article, we take issue with 3 aspects of their study. First, the study inadequately equates ecological success with increased wildlife and reduced livestock densities. Second, the study fails to adequately account for causality between the Wildlife Management Area (WMA) policy and the observed changes in wildlife and livestock densities. Third, the study misrepresents the reality of community-based conservation in Randilen WMA. Researchers seeking to further our understanding of community-based natural resource management by evaluating its impacts must proceed with careful attention to the complex and dynamic socio-ecologies of the environments they study.