“Africa’s parks hold the most charismatic species on the planet – giraffe, elephant, hippo, zebra, lion, leopard and cheetah – a true global heritage. It’s up to all of us to help cover the costs of protecting these species. If the lion goes extinct, all these other species will go as well. We must all work together, but the scale of funding is beyond the scope of conservation groups. The financial requirements can only be met by world governments.”
World Lion Day matters, and here’s why. Just 100 years ago, nearly 200,000 wild lions roamed across Africa.
Today, there are 20,000 — if that.
Photojournalist Graeme Green’s “New Big 5 Project” is designed to create a new “Big Five” of wildlife photography — the Big Five was an expression originally coined by big game hunters with small appendages to label and identify the five African animals most difficult to hunt — and while the African lion made that particular list, there’s no reason to think it won’t make the new list as well.
Real men, after all, take shots with a camera, not a high-powered hunting rifle.
Furthermore, not only does the lion live to see another day, but in terms of generating tourist revenue, a lion that lives to see another day draws more visitors the next day, and so on.
It’s hard to believe that some stakeholders — and even some scientists — insist that trophy hunting raises money for conservation and gives local people a reason to ensure a steady supply of lions for the trophy wall, when the simple truth of the matter is that money raised by trophy hunting disappears long before it ever reaches the conservation stage. Wildlife tourism, on the other hand, pays for itself over and over, and is the reason many African parks are financially sustainable. Strange as it may sound, tourists — and wildlife photographers — would rather photograph a living lion than a dead one.
As Dr. Craig Packer, a professor of ecology at the University of Minnesota and one of the world’s most respected authorities on lion behaviour, noted in his seminal 2015 book Lions in the Balance: Man-Eaters, Manes, and Men with Guns, “Hunting companies had a misplaced belief in the ‘inexhaustible supply’ of nature. They needed to learn that natural populations were finite.”
They still need to learn that, by some accounts — and so do some university-educated field biologists, it seems.
Packer knows a little something of what he speaks: He is both the founder and former director of the Serengeti Lion Research Center, and is chiefly known for his research on lions in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. (He has been banned from Tanzania for his efforts, and his accusations of systemic corruption high up in Tanzanian government circles, but that’s a discussion for a whole other day.)
That’s a big deal on two fronts: Serengeti is a name known to the public-at-large, even among those who haven’t studied lions or travelled to Africa, and who — let’s face it — may never travel to Africa, Covid or no Covid. They have, however, seen The Lion King.
The Serengeti Lion Research project is the world leader in lion research, and dates back to the work of George Schaller and the late Hugo van Lawick — Jane Goodall’s then-husband — who established that lions lead complex social lives unique among the big cats, social lives we’re still learning about.
World Lion Day is about more than another trip to the zoo, or — God help us — the circus, then.
It means something.
It matters.
Because, if current trends continue the way they are at the present rate, in another 100 years or so there will be no wild lions, in Africa or anywhere else.
That is all.
©Alex Strachan