Outdoors: Lions need more protection

A Minnesota dentist’s shooting of Cecil, a much-observed, very old lion that wandered out of his sanctuary in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, has caused an unprecedented global roar of outrage.

This international condemnation highlights the tragedy of a single African lion while the whole species is vanishing before our eyes. The world’s contempt for lion genocide up to now has been woefully missing. It should have been thunderously expressed over the last several decades while 400,000 nameless lions were being speared, snared, shot or poisoned.

When I was born, lions in Africa numbered about 450,000. Ninety percent of them are gone today. Their extirpation has been directly proportionate to human population expansion, not trophy hunting. Historically, lions once prowled abundantly from Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, all the way into India. The only place outside Africa still harboring lions today is India’s Gir forest, with a fragile population of about 500. People and lions coexist peacefully only on safaris.

The current fervor of nouveau lion lovers and sensation-seeking media has erupted too late — and like a misleading red herring is woefully misdirected at a single hunter. Informed outcries should have been voiced with increasing indignation beginning decades ago to stop the most significant threat to lion survival: an ever-growing human population that eliminates lion habitat with their expanding cattle, farms and settlements.

Human birth rates are highest in the rural areas of Africa, which, besides national parks and reserves, unfortunately also happen to be the lion’s last domain. Many tribal groups are sustained by cattle, which they cherish like family members. When a lion inevitably wanders on the peripheries of rural communities and occasionally kills one of their cows, herders are devastated financially and emotionally. They’re supposed to just report the killing and receive compensation from the government.

But the verifying of claims and making of payments takes far too long, and the compensation isn’t nearly enough to satisfy the cow’s owner. Consequently, locals often resort to dealing with a problem lion as they always have — killing it — even though that’s technically illegal today. But instead of relying on spears as was their custom, they now malevolently set out cheap, readily bought, lethal poisons to place in carcasses for returning lions to ingest.

The practice is horrific, taking a collateral toll on other innocent lions that come in to the irresistible bait, along with numerous other opportunistic species including jackals, civets, honey badgers, hyenas, genets, vultures and even tawny eagles. The great number of reprisals across the region has taken a horrific toll on private lands.

The killing of lions is not limited to poor tribesmen. Large-scale farmers have long taken their tolls. And in South Africa, game ranchers have secretly killed nomadic lions that entered their farms and ate their plains game stock. Some lions are also killed in the name of tradition.

Masai friends confide to me that while it may be illegal, warriors wishing to become eligible for marriage continue to secretly seek out and spear a lion.

Without adequate compensation for game wardens, we can expect lion poaching to increase even more as an Asian market wanting big cat body parts for male impotency problems looks to the lion to replace the vanishing tiger.

As villages continue to grow right up to the boundaries of national parks, poaching and poisoning reprisals have become more prevalent. The unfortunate truth is that the local peoples of Africa, unless they are environmentally educated and connected positively with eco-tourism, are intolerant of ever-lurking lions, which threaten them and their livestock while providing no benefits. Lions basically are unacceptable to humans outside of reserves and national parks.

Trophy hunters take only about 500 lions per year in Africa. While that number is unsustainable today, legal hunting was not the overwhelming precipitant of the lion’s demise. Habitat loss and human conflicts are responsible for the lion’s share of this horrific tragedy.

All along, African governments should have instituted better lion sustaining conservation policies. But they didn’t. Environmental priorities have been secondary to human priorities, largely for financial reasons. Only Botswana has thus far been successful with its dedication to wildlife.

For people who have moved into lion habitat, the great cats have negative value. The majority of lion country natives celebrate whenever a lion is killed. Their attitude is far different from those of us who see lions idealistically from afar in television documentaries and value them for their unique, wild magnificence. We know that Africa without the lion is not the real, wild Africa. In our distant armchairs, we’d like to keep it wild. The only locals who share our values are those who are environmentally educated and can share in the influx of tourist dollars that are spent to experience a wild lion.

Those few environmentally enlightened tribes, like Kenya’s Masai and Samburu, offer glimmers of hope. But the economic reality is that we can’t make all of Africa an eco-tourist destination. There are just too many human mouths to feed to leave it for the production of lion food. With that population increasing nightmarishly, the squeeze on lions is going to get only tighter. It truly would be wonderful if Cecil’s death could reverse what seems tragically inevitable. The outraged world could finally help if it were as generous with funding as it is with words.

We need to better educate the rural communities, buy and expand critical lion habitat contiguous with national parks and reserves, and reverse habitat loss in critical migration corridors, too. All that means lots of money and political resolve. But it’s still possible.

Difficult decisions that affect humans, though, will need to be made like those recently effected in India, where most of the world’s tiger population is now down to about 1,200. Entire villages that were set up in critical tiger habitats are now being relocated, and people are being compensated large sums of money to establish themselves in new communities.

Africa needs massive international help for many problems. If the world wants to save the lion, it hast to come forward now with financial support, not just roars of outrage.

—Contact Mark Blazis at markblazis@charter.net.