This study updates the social picture painted on forestry practices of nomadic herders in the Cameroonian Sahel. It extends the debates in the literature by Petit and Walkins on the pruning in Britain. Drawing on social and public representations, opinions on how to harvest tree foliage appear to be divergent. The skeptics believe that pastoral farming has always had negative effects on nature, unlike the convinced. Based on the documentation concerning the dendrometric measurement data taken in the Sahel and the surveys carried out between 2013-2019 in 17 agrosylvopastoral terroirs on a sample of 510 people aged 30 to over 80 years, the images designed on the pastoral activity are contradictory. If the scientific data from the measurements of the branches to be pruned and those of ethnologists and pastoralists indicate rationality in the practices, this is not always the case for ecologists and foresters for whom these practices affect the plant and therefore contribute to the desertification. From then on, a debate was put on the table at the Earth Summit in 1992 and still fuels the controversy today.