On World Lion Day and ‘The New Big 5’

“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.”

— Dr. Craig Packer, World Lion Day

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.

https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2016/10/11/african-lions-on-the-brink-a-conversation-with-lion-expert-craig-packer/

https://www.newbig5.com/lions-photo-gallery

©Alex Strachan

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Of Green Days and American Idiots — Trophy Hunting Back In the Spotlight

“Bearing in mind that climate change is helping to remove animals and in 50 years time probably humans as well, now is the time for us to get into a position without being hypocritical. We are all hoping that Boris [Johnson] will see that cruelty is what we’re talking about — bullying bastards are involved and people who are vain sticking lovely dead animals on their walls.”

— Sir Ranulph Fiennes in The Guardian, 17 Feb 2020

One of the inevitable burdens of growing old, the writer Paul Theroux has said, is hearing the same old arguments over and over again, made by people who think they’re the first to think of them.

Which brings us again to the issue of trophy hunting as a panacea for environmental degradation and species extinction.

This has come up now because the newly re-elected UK government is once again considering a ban on the import of some — but not all — animal trophies. The old, entrenched forces on either side of the divide have dug in yet again, knee deep in the big muddy.

It’s a pointless debate either way, because, as Greta Thunberg will be only too happy to tell you, politicians — especially populist politicians — don’t believe in promises. They tell people what they think people want to hear, change their minds on a whim, and can’t be trusted as far as you can throw a lion bone at them.

The debate persists because, let’s face it, people like to argue and — Greta and her climate supporters aside — they’re not that interested in doing anything, particularly if doing something comes at a personal cost or minor inconvenience.

A well-known lion researcher and Oxford-educated field biologist working in Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park recently faced a social-media backlash for stating the case for trophy hunting as a way to protect Africa’s increasingly threatened population of wild lions. She ended up being disinvited from a conservation conference in the UK, despite citing her Oxford degree and years of field research as qualifying credentials. This researcher’s position, backed by the hunting lobby, is that private land needs to provide an income if it’s not to be redeveloped for condos or a new superhighway, and charging fat dentists from Minnesota major dollars to shoot a lion helps pay for the land’s keep, and allows other animals living there to be left alone. It’s the old, “If it pays, it stays” argument. If landowners can’t make money off their land, the reasoning goes, it will fall into neglect, and everyone loses — the land owners, the animals, and the land itself.

When I weighed in with a contrary comment of my own, I had an owner of a neighbouring hunting blocks — the accepted lingo for hunting concession areas —  take me to task for not acknowledging the financial risks involved. “We don’t have any animals,” he said. “What are we supposed to do?”

Perhaps the reason you don’t any animals is that they’ve all been shot out, but that argument is likely always to fall on deaf ears.

Never mind that one of the most compelling arguments in favour of tourism, as opposed to hunting, as that once the tourists have spent

their money and gone home, the lion or elephant or what-have-you is still there, but why spoil the beauty of an argument with petty details?

I mentioned the Oxford researcher to another leading authority on lion behaviour — arguably the leading authority on lion conservation, an academic who has been banned from Tanzania for his troubles, and his outspoken comments about government corruption — it’s odd how funds earmarked for conservation always seem to vanish under mysterious circumstances — and he replied, via Facebook message, that, “She’s wasting her time” trying to work with the hunting lobby.

And then there’s Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who unloaded just this past week in The Guardian about what utter contempt he holds trophy hunters — “Bullying bastards!” — in, and how, at age 75 and one of the leading British explorers of his generation with several endurance records to his name, he is fed up with the same discredited arguments being made time and time again.

But don’t take my — or Sir Ranulph’s — word for it. Here’s some supplemental reading which represents different points-of-view in the debate. Read them and judge for yourself what you think sounds right and feels right. Emotion v. reason, right v.wrong — take your pick. I know where I stand, and it’s not with the fat dentist from Minnesota, nor the idiot sons of an American grotesque who strides atop the world stage at the present moment in time.

That’s just me speaking personally, mind — as well as correctly and objectively, to borrow a line from the late-night comedian John Oliver.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/opinion/481669-saving-africas-last-lions-will-rely-on-evidence-not-emotion

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/17/ranulph-fiennes-labels-trophy-hunters-bullying-bastards-and-calls-for-uk-import-ban-aoe

https://www.conservationconversation.co.uk/single-post/Prof-Craig-Packer-on-Trophy-Hunting

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/19/tanzania-to-relocate-36-serengeti-lions-after-attacks-on-humans-and-cattle

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/09/150916-book-talk-simon-worrall-craig-packer-lions-serengeti-tanzania-trophy-hunting-africa-conservation/

https://www.gq.com/story/what-its-like-to-hunt-an-elephant

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/19/wildlife-killing-deer-diversity-resources-environment

Ranulph Fiennes. Photo ©Stefan Rousseau-PA

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Moonstruck: Hunting Under a Full Moon

“It’s a beautiful story, a very clear example of how the presence or absence of the moon can have fundamental, ecosystem-level impacts.”

— Davide Dominoni, University of Glasgow

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, lunar science is still capable of surprise. Moonlight, as Science News reported this past weekend, shapes how many animals move, behave and plant the seeds for future generations. 

Just one example: Twice a month, from March through August — right now, in other words — hundreds of thousands of California grunion, silvery sardine lookalikes, beach themselves in the sand late at night and plant their eggs, which will hatch 10 days later. The incoming tide will wash the hatchlings out to sea, and their new home. The mating ritual is timed to the tides, with the hatching coinciding with the peak high tide, every two weeks.

As science now knows, the ultimate force choreographing this dance is the moon.

Another example: lions.

On the other side of the world, in Botswana, nature filmmakers and National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence Beverly Joubert and Dereck Joubert noted years ago how lions become more active under the full moon. Under the light of a full moon, lions even going as far as to tackle elephants — who are more comfortable in daylight — if they’re hungry enough and desperate enough, and if they sense an opportunity for the taking. The Jouberts were the first explorers to capture their strange find on film.

Hyenas are active at night, too, all the more so under a full moon, as the Jouberts recounted in their 1997 book Hunting with the Moon: The Lions of Savuti, one of the classics of African wildlife photography.  

True, it’s no surprise to scientists who study lions in the Serengeti — or anyone else, for that matter — that lions are more active at night, especially under a full moon. Cats are nocturnal, for the most part, after all.

What behavioural science has found interesting of late, though, is how the lions’ prey respond to the ever-changing threat at night, as the moon waxes

and wanes.

A 2016 study that involved some 200 camera traps over an area the size of Los Angeles found that wildebeest avoid places where lions are known to congregate on the darkest nights, when there is little moonlight to see by.

Another prey animal, the buffalo, were shown to huddle in ever larger herds on the darkest nights.

Different species, the researchers found, make different risk assessments, depending on the changing light, and modify their behaviour accordingly. (The study findings, co-authored by University of Minnesota ecologist and lion expert Dr. Craig Packer, were published in the science journal Ecology Letters in 2017. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ele.12832)

There’s more, too. The light of the moon influences the movement of the annual migrations in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. River crossings, which take place in daylight for the most part, have been known to occur on nights when there is a full moon to see by.

Behavioural scientists are constantly looking to find a human connection — whether the moon affects such human triggers as 

emotion and aggression, aside from that which is the stuff of Hollywood movies. That said, behavioural ecologist Davide Dominoni, of Scotland’s University of Glasgow, cautions against jumping to easy-to-reach conclusions.

“It’s really hard to find definitive answers because most of the studies are correlational,” he told Science News.

A correlation could be real, or due to some other factor — a common mistake in “junk science,” which seeks to find a human connection where there may be none. Until scientific researchers come up with a way to determine with hard evidence how the moon affects human behaviour one way or the other, it will remain the stuff of fevered speculation.

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