Zimbabwe

Akashinga, ‘The Braves Ones,’ the women saving Africa’s wildlife — and now finalists for the World Press Photo of the Year.

March 02, 2019

Judging from the social-media nontroversies over judging faux pas at past World Press Photo Awards, one could be forgiven for thinking the prestigious photo contest,now in its 62nd year, must have an enemies list to rival that at any MAGA rally.

There were the concerns over “post-processing” in 2013; the staged photos and subsequent disqualification of a WPPA-winning photographer in 2015; the cancellation of the WPP exhibition at Visa Pour L’image (also in 2015); the creation of a new category, for “creative documentary photography” in 2016 (a competition that, in the words of contest organizers, “not have rules limiting how images are produced,” that would allow staged and manipulated images); questions about the authenticity of the 2nd-place long-term projects winner (‘An Iranian Journey’) in 2017; and the fracas over 2017’s World Press Photo of the Year, of which jury chair Stuart Franklin said at the time, “I didn’t think, if I’m honest with you, that (this) should be World Press Photo of the Year.”

One photographer’s controversy is another’s nontroversy.

If I’m honest with you — speaking strictly for myself — the London Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards aside, the World Press Photo awards is the one I pay closest attention to.

And that’s why I was gratified to see that, this year, for the second year in a row, an environmental conservation photographer has been nominated for World Press Photo of the Year.

New York-based, South African-born war photographer Brent Stirton — whose controversial (hard to avoid that word, where high-profile photojournalism awards are concerned) image of a dead rhino slaughtered for its horn won the 2018 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award — has made the shortlist of six images for this year’s World Press Photo of the Year, for his image Akashinga — the Brave Ones.

The Akashinga are an all-female anti-poaching unit in Zimbabwe, not the most stable country on earth, nor the easiest for women to take up arms against poachers — all men — willing to kill anyone who stands between them and the booming market in illegal ivory and rhino horn.

The World Press Photo Awards are top-shelf in my view because, unlike, say, the Pulitzers, they reflect the world’s best, not just America. The other nominees for Photo of the Year, for example, hail from Italy (Marco Gualazzini, Almajiri Boy); Syria (Mohammed Badra, Victims of an Alleged Gas Attack Receive Treatment in Eastern Ghouta); France-Spain (Catalina Martin-Chico, Being Pregnant after FARC Child-Bearing Ban); Australia (Chris McGrath, The Disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi); and the U.S. (John Moore, Crying Girl on the Border).

Shortlisted candidates in other categories include photojournalists from Venezuela, Mexico, the Netherlands and Sweden.

In all, 43 photographers from 25 countries have been nominated for this year’s awards, the 62nd edition in the organization’s history. A new category, World Press Story of the Year, should prove less controversial than 2016’s “Photoshop is OK” category — fake news! — but recent history cautions that wherever there is a high-profile photo contest with the profile of the WPOTY or WPP awards, controversy inevitably follows.

The World Press Photos are a lightning rod for debate because they’re now the world’s most high-profile competition in a field of photography that’s all about competition. Winning can lead to paid work in what’s an ever-shrinking pool of full-time staff jobs with credible, reputable media organizations.

Different juries judge the awards each year, which lessens the chance of an institutional bias — or laziness — setting in.

Stirton knows that a great story lies at the heart of any great photograph. He got his start as a war photographer, covering conflict on his home continent of Africa. In his later years — he’s now repped by Getty Images in New York — his photojournalism has taken on more of an environmental angle, the result of his witnessing, and photographing, a mountain gorilla slaughtered for its body parts in a war-torn corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DNC), more than a decade ago now, in 2007.

An all-female army of wildlife rangers sounds like a gimmick, but as a BBC story by correspondent Rachel Nuwer last September showed, it isn’t. The project is the brainchild of Australian Defence Force special-operations sniper Damien Mander, who had been hired to stem a wave of poaching in Zimbabwe’s Phundundu Wildlife Park, a 115-square-mile former trophy-hunting area, ground zero in a larger ecosystem that’s home to some 11,000 elephants. The women, 16 in all, come from backgrounds of abuse and deprivation, and so are motivated to prove what they can do. The women feel empowered, and are more likely to improve their communities in the process. They chose the name “Akashinga” themselves, after Mander asked them to come up with a name for their unit. Akashinga means “the Brave Ones,” in the local Shona language.

“There’s a saying in Africa,” Mander told BBC. “‘If you educate a man, you educate an individual. But if you educate a woman, you educate a nation.’ We’re seeing increasing evidence that empowering women is one of the greatest forces of change in the world today.”

The situation is serious. In just seven years, Africa’s elephant populations have crashed by 30%, largely due to poaching.

Stirton’s World Press Photo nominated image is a portrait of Petronella Chigumbura, age 30, in the field, where her specialty is in military stealth and concealment. Akashinga’s stated aim is to work with rather than against local communities, Stirton explained in his submission. This is especially relevant today, as a renewed debate over whether trophy hunting can help fund conservation efforts, in wilderness areas where elephant populations have grown to the point where an ever-shrinking ecosystem can no longer sustain herd animals that eat up to 500 kgs. of trees and agricultural crops a day. Unlike trophy hunting, conservationists argue, finding ways to get local communities involved in serving and protecting wild animals is a long-term solution rather than a short-term fix.

For his part, Stirton understands that a single powerful image is worth a thousand words — at least — if, at the end of the day, the idea is to galvanize people to act.

The same could be said of any of this year’s six finalists of course. A single image can indeed change the world. And that, controversies aside, is what the World Press Photo Awards are all about.

The 62nd Annual World Press Photo Awards will be handed out April 11 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180926-akashinga-all-women-rangers-in-africa-fighting-poaching

https://mymodernmet.com/world-press-photo-nominees-2019/

https://www.thedodo.com/heartbreaking-gorilla-picture-1424690984.html

©Mohammed Badra/European PressPhoto Agency

Of painted wolves and African wild dogs: ‘Dynasties’ most emotionally wrenching hour yet.

February 07, 2019

Life in the wild is hard. We know this.

From the first hour, the David Attenborough-narrated nature program Dynasties has been unflinching in its depiction of survival.

Even so, the fourth episode in this exquisite — and intensely personal — series, airing this weekend in the US for the first time (BBC America, AMC Networks, Sat. 9E/P, 8C), is harrowing and emotionally wrenching. The episode Painted Wolf, filmed along the banks of the Zambezi River in Mana Pools National Park, a remote, relatively untrammelled region of wilderness area in Zimbabwe, made director and cameraman Nick Lyon physically ill at one point, as he stood by helplessly as a painted wolf pup, part of a family group the filmmaking team had followed for two years, was grabbed by a crocodile from a riverbank.

Painted wolves — once known as African wild dogs, before conservation groups decided that the name “wild dogs” was unhelpful in raising awareness of the plight of one of Africa’s most rare and critically endangered predators — are social animals. For the purposes of storytelling, the filmmakers followed two groups in rival territories. As the program begins, one of the competing groups is led by a wise but aging matriarch, nicknamed Tait; the other group is led by her estranged daughter Blacktip, who is young and healthy and looking to stake out her own territory. Murder and mayhem ensue, in arguably the most bloody and brutal hour in Dynasties’ entire run.

Complicating the already complicated family entanglements are other predators — lions, hyenas and the prehistoric, monstrously sized crocodile that caused filmmaker Lyon such distress. Predators are conditioned by nature to kill other predators when and where they can, in part to alleviate competition for a limited and often dwindling food supply.

The wrenching scene, in which one of the pups is snatched unsuspecting by the paw and dragged into the water, flailing helplessly, made Lyon, a veteran cameraman and producer with BBC’s Natural History Unit, sick.

“When you follow animals as long as we did,” he told The Telegraph, via BBC, “you get to know them and care what happens to them.

“It becomes an emotional experience when you see one of the characters having a bad time, or having real success. I loved the puppies. I remember when they were out of the den for the first time at just three weeks old. They were so tiny, with oversized heads, that would overbalance on their front legs.”

Lyon described the rivalry between mother and estranged daughter as Shakespearian, both in scale and in the intensity of its rivalry.

From a natural history point-of-view — and from the perspective of the casual viewer who watches nature programs from time to time — the hour is a reminder of just how challenging life in the wild really is, even in the most ideal of climatic and environmental conditions, and the fine margins between life and death. It’s hard enough to survive, let alone thrive. It’s impossible to watch Painted Wolf and not be moved by what’s unfolding on the screen.

Away from the screen, if real life, painted wolves, African wild dogs, Cape hunting dogs or whatever you care to call them, face an uncertain future. As a nation, Zimbabwe is beset by genuine real-world problems that involve real-world hardship for countless people, problems that range from poverty, drought and hunger to corruption, bad governance and a failing economy. As pristine as the Mana Pools wilderness appears to the outside eye, the entire ecosystem is in peril, besieged on all sides. It’s hard to imagine how even an adaptable charismatic animal like the painted wolf can cope, and yet cope they must if they are to survive as a species.

Lyon estimates he and his camera crew drove through some 82,000 kms — 51,000 miles — of miombo woodlands while tracking Tait, Blacktip and their respective aunts, uncles, offspring and more distant relatives. The insights they gleaned along the way were extraordinary.

In its three outings so far during its US debut, Dynasties has established itself as a unique, compelling and hypnotic document of natural history, even by the lofty standards of other such BBC Attenborough programs as Planet Earth and Blue Planet. Tough to watch, yes, but unforgettable at times.

Hunting the hunters — when animals bite back.

July 08, 2018

Karma.

The philosophy of action, no less an authority than the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi famously said, is that no one else is the giver of peace or happiness. One’s own actions are responsible to come to bring either happiness or success or whatever.

The answer in this case, as it turned out, was “whatever.”

Suspected rhino poachers broke into a South African game reserve late at night this past week — hoping, no doubt, to bag themselves a couple of rhinos. Rhino horn fetches more than its weight in gold or cocaine on today’s black market, and that has led to a thriving illegal trade in the horn.

The poachers no doubt expected to make an easy killing — rhinos, after all, are near-sighted, none too bright and make a tempting target. The poachers were looking to make a quick buck — but lions got them instead.

Karma.

It sounds like one of those apocryphal tales the African wilds are famous for, but anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of bushcraft knows that truth is often stranger than fiction where lions are concerned.

The story was first reported by local news outlets near Sibuya Game Reserve in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, but anyone assuming it was just another case of fake news was quickly disabused of the notion. The reserve’s on-duty veterinarian darted the offending lions so that police forensic investigators could isolate the evidence — this, after human remains were found last Tuesday, alongside discarded wire cutters, a high-powered rifle, three pairs of boots and three pairs of gloves.

A pride of half a dozen lions was found to be resting nearby — one likes to think well fed and sunning themselves under the winter sun.

Sibuya is a private reserve; owner Nick Fox told local media that one of his security staff heard a loud commotion coming from the lions sometime late last Sunday night or in the early hours of Monday morning.

Fox concluded the poachers must have stumbled onto the lions in the dark, never to be seen or heard from again. Lions, unlike humans, can see well in the dark — their night vision is six times sharper than that of humans — and do most of their hunting under cover of darkness. Daylight is for sleeping, where lions are concerned.

Once police confirmed the evidence and entered the incident into the official record, the story was quickly picked up by the international news agencies Associated Press and Agence France-Presse, and from there to BBC, CNN International and al-Jazeera, among other cable-news outlets. (

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/05/world/south-africa-poachers-killed-trnd/index.html )

This isn’t the first time hunted animals have had their Day of the Triffids moment, of course, nor will it be the last.

In May of this year, South African big game hunter and prototypical fat man Theunis Botha, 51, died after being crushed by an elephant that had been shot on a private reserve in Zimbabwe. Botha cashed in his chips — and I am not making this up — at the aptly named Good Luck Farm, near Zimbabwe’s world-famous — and now infamous — Hwange National Park.

Hwange was where Cecil the lion met his end at the hands of a fat American dentist, Walter Palmer, in July, 2015.

In February of this past year, a poacher hunting big cats was mauled to death by lions at a private gamed reserve in South Africa. The unidentified poacher was killed at the 3,000-hectare Ingwelala Nature Reserve, an hour’s drive outside Hoedspruit, in South Africa’s Limpopo province.

The incident happened just months after a poacher in Namibia, identified as Luteni Muhararakua, was charged and killed by a rhino he was hunting for its horn.

This past January, a Russian man was shot dead by his own dog during a winter hunting trip on the banks of the Volga River in southwestern Russia. Sergei Terekhov, 64, died after letting his two hunting hounds out of his car. As the dogs began to frolic, one of the dog’s paws caught the trigger of Terekhov’s hunting rifle, which was on the ground at the time, with the barrel pointed toward his chest.

According to a story in the UK newspaper The Independent at the time, investigators told the Russian Vzglyad-Info news agency, and I quote, “An experienced hunter was killed. He was sober. There was a permit for weapons. Everything was OK. There was an accident.”

Also in January, a Croatian hunter, Pero Jelenic, 75, was killed by a stray bullet while hunting lions during a so-called canned hunt at South Africa’s Leeubosch Lodge, a four-hour drive from Johannesburg about 50 kms. from the Botswana border. A friend of Jelenic’s told Croatia’s Jutarnji List newspaper that Jelenic, “died doing what he loved — his office, a hunting hall, was full of trophies, deer and bear specimens and everything that could be hunted in Croatia and Europe.”

Clearly, Africa proved too big for him.

Then there was the young bull elephant that crushed professional hunter and Ian Gibson to death after Gibson, 55, tried to shoot it in Zimbabwe’s Zambezi Valley little more than a year ago, in June, 2017.

Would it surprise you to learn Gibson was a little on the heavy side?

Think of it as a recurring theme.

As late-night comedian Bill Maher said at the time, “You know the elephant is the nobler of the two because, when the hunter wins, it’s the greatest moment of his life, and when the elephant wins, it’s, ‘Eww, what did I step in?”

These karmic moments are few and far between, of course, given the scale of the destruction being wreaked against the natural world today.

Still, every little moment counts. There’s always room for hope.

https://www.livescience.com/62998-lions-kill-rhino-poachers.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/10/high-price-of-rhino-horn-leaves-bloody-trail-across-the-globe

Botswana bites back: Trophy hunting boosts poaching, not other way round.

March 20, 2018

One of the perils of growing old, the respected novelist and essayist Paul Theroux wrote in his Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, is hearing the same old arguments over and over again from younger people who believe they were the first to think fo that argument.

To anyone on the ground with a working knowledge of the campaign to save endangered wildlife, a wearily familiar — and thoroughly discredited — old saw goes like this:

Trophy hunting is good for conservation, because it generates much-needed revenue to finance anti-poaching efforts.

It’s quite all right for a fat American dentist to shoot Cecil the Lion for the trophy wall, because the fee and costs he paid will go toward saving other lions.

Leaving aside the fact that in all probability not one Zimbabwe dollar — or American dollar for that matter — was ploughed back into lion conservation, it’s a bogus argument from top to bottom. The licence fee for a trophy bull elephant in Zimbabwe is USD $20,000; that same fee for an elephant in South Africa with tusks weighing over 50 lbs. is USD $50,000, not counting mandatory daily safari costs and the official daily rate per hunter and attendant trackers and camp staff.

Here’s where common sense trumps the financial-incentive argument, though — common sense over common cents, if you will.

An elephant shot for its ivory, or to be mounted on the wall of the family den back in the good state of Minnesota, or wherever, is a one-off in terms of revenue, even if that revenue was being put back into conservation, which it isn’t.

Tourism, though — much maligned by trophy hunters as a pastime for weaklings, losers and snowflakes — generates income, and jobs, day after day, for as long as the animal(s) in question stays alive in the wild.

That fat American dentist got his money’s worth out of Cecil the lion — arguably — but who knows how much money would still be generated today, right now, if Cecil were still alive, still there to show off his pride to tourists willing to pay USD $500 a night in some cases for the privilege of staying in a lodge within driving distance of lion territory. Botswana is the most expensive travel destination in Africa by far, in part because, unlike Kenya, Tanzania and even South Africa, Botswana’s national government made a conscious decision to cater to an elite few who can afford the exorbitant cost of a safari in the Okavango Delta, Chobe National Park and Moremi Game Reserve. in the theory that small numbers of well-paying visitors leave less of an imprint on a fragile environment than a mob of backpackers flocking to the Amboseli, Maasai Mara and Serengeti on the cheap, in East Africa.

Even in the Mara, though, where many of the local area conservancies are owned, managed and maintained by local Maasai stakeholders, even high-volume tourism is preferable to letting fat American dentists shoot every lion they see, no matter how high a licence fee they may be willing to pay.

That’s why Botswana President Ian Khama’s announcement late last week that Donald Trump’s decision to reverse his proposed ban on the import of big-game trophies, such as lions and elephants, will encourage more poaching, not less.

The reason legal hunting encourages illegal hunting doesn’t have so much to do with hunting itself as it does the market. Legal trophy hunting boosts the demand for legitimate ivory and lion trophies, which in turn feeds the market for illegal hunting. Since hardly anyone — not even a forensic pathologist or wildlife biologist — can tell the difference between legal ivory and that which has been harvested illegally, it doesn’t much matter where it came from, since no one can prove it anyway.

Only by closing down the market can the demand be controlled and eventually eliminated entirely.

And there’s no better way to shut down a market than to ban the importation of whatever it is people are trying to import, where it’s a lion head, elephant tusks or Bolivian marching powder.

If a fat American dentist shoots a trophy lion, but is unable to take that trophy home to show off to his friends and brag about what a He-Man he is, he’s unlikely to want to shoot that lion in the first place, especially at those prices ($25,000+, not including travel costs and mandatory daily fees and camp costs, not to mention tips for the staff).

Khama, speaking this past weekend at an anti-poaching summit in Kasane, Botswana, pointed out that Botswana banned hunting entirely some time ago, but that it is still legal in countries like Tanzania, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. (Hunting has also been banned in Kenya, which has on occasion fed cross-border tensions between Kenya and neighbouring Tanzania,)

Khama said Trump’s overturning the US ban on the import of hunting trophies would only fuel poaching in his home country of Botswana. There has been a dramatic spike in poaching across Africa over the past 18 months, driven almost wholly by insatiable demand in Southeast Asia, China and, yes, the U.S. for elephant ivory and rhino horn.

Khama didn’t stop at trophy hunting, where Trump was concerned. He told the BBC that he was concerned about Trump’s “attitude toward the whole planet,” not just the import of hunting trophies.

The situation facing elephants is grave, despite the worldwide campaign by environmentalists, ecologists, conservationists, wildlife biologists and ordinary, everyday working people who want their children and grandchildren to possibly be able to see an elephant in the wild one day. Mike Chase, director of the conservation agency Elephants Without Borders, said at that same conference that he believes the worst of the poaching crisis is not yet over.

Botswana aside, Chase told delegates, “The political will to address these issues is not there, unfortunately.

“It has been in Botswana. And if our neighbours can learn from Botswana’s example, it will go a long way toward addressing this crisis.”

Despite the old, discredited argument that trophy hunting aids conservation efforts financially, the bottom line remains the bottom line: A lion or elephant is worth more alive, in terms of jobs, income and education opportunities to local communities in rural Africa, than it is dead.

Even a fat American dentist should be able to figure that out.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/campaigns/GiantsClub/donald-trump-encouraging-poachers-a8260776.html

Dances with cheetahs: Kim Wolhuter films cheetah family on foot for PBS Nature special.

November 07, 2017

If there’s one thing lifelong conservationist and wildlife filmmaker Kim Wolhuter hopes viewers will take away from Wednesday’s PBS Nature special The Cheetah Children, it’ll be a sense of wonder for what remains of the natural world. Viewers themselves can take solace, too, in knowing that, if only for an hour, the news events of the day will seem faraway. PBS’s Nature — 36 seasons and climbing — has always been one of the more sober, clear-headed, less sensationalist nature programs, but it’s also carved out a hard-earned reputation for family-friendly programming that’s neither maudlin nor condescending.

The Cheetah Children, in which Wolhuter tracked a mother cheetah and her five vulnerable, weeks-old cubs with his camera through the thorn scrub and miombo bush of Zimbabwe’s Malilangwe Wildlife Reserve, has some hard lessons about natural selection and survival of the fittest, but it’s also a window into a world of almost breathtaking beauty. And simplicity.

There are no contrived confrontations between man and beast, no deliberately manipulative scenes designed to play on the audience’s emotions. In the best tradition of PBS Nature documentaries, what the cheetahs see is what you get at home, warts and all. Warthogs, too.

First, some background. There’s some of this in the program, but The Cheetah Children was never intended to be an informational lecture, or a PSA for saving endangered species per se.

The cheetah is the world’s fastest land animal, capable of sprints of 70 mph over short distances. More impressively, perhaps, the loose-limbed, lightly built cat is built for acceleration — an average adult cheetah can hit 45 mph in two seconds, faster than any Ferrari built by human hands.

It is also in serious trouble, and not just for the usual reasons — habitat destruction, poaching, trophy hunting, illegal wildlife trafficking for the pet trade, and so on. A genetic bottleneck early in the cheetah’s prehistory means that their gene pool today is tenuous at best. Many cheetahs are born with genetic deficiencies — a weak jaw, a lame foot, brittle bones, etc. Any kind of leg injury to an animal built for speed is tantamount to a death sentence.

Nature has compensated, as viewers learn early on in The Cheetah Children. Cheetahs have big litters, because the infant mortality rate is so high. Whereas the stronger, more powerful — and more genetically successful — leopard has one or two cubs, a cheetah may have as many as 10 or more.

Depending on the terrain, and how many rival predators there are in a cheetah’s territory — lions, leopards and hyenas will all kill cheetahs on sight, because nature has conditioned predators to see any competition for food as a rival for their own survival — as few as two cheetah cubs may live to see adulthood, and often not even that.

Wolhuter took great pains in The Cheetah Children to show that this is a natural process, one more complication in nature’s game of survival.

Even so, knowing the species is in real danger of extinction in our lifetimes, it’s hard to watch.

Wolhuter, the grown son of one of South Africa’s original park wardens — his father, Henry Wolhuter, was at one time Head Ranger of South Africa’s world-famous Kruger National Park, southern Africa’s equivalent of Yellowstone National Park — grew up wild.

He learned from a young age how to survive on his own in the wilderness, and how to read nature’s signs, good or bad. He learned walk barefoot through thorn scrub, and in so doing learned how to blend into his surroundings and pick up on the small details that can mean the difference between survival and dying. He learned that wild animals can become more accepting of people outside vehicles, once they determine the intruder poses no threat. The result is that today, virtually alone among contemporary wildlife filmmakers, Wolhuter makes nearly all his films on foot. That affords him a rare intimacy into the lives of his live subjects, one rarely captured by other wildlife filmmakers.

At a recent meeting of the Television Critics Association in Beverly Hills, Calif. — a world apart from the mopane forests and Zambezi teak trees of Zimbabwe — Wolhuter shared some of his innermost thoughts about living wild and one of his earlier documentaries, the self-explanatory Man, Cheetah, Wild, made at the time for the Discovery Channel. Malilangwe Reserve is in Zimbabwe’s southeastern hinterland, near the Mozambique border and about as far away from Zimbabwe’s tourist-travelled Victoria Falls as it is to get and still be in Zimbabwe.

“There's no special muti, as we call it, or juju,” Wolhuter said. “It's just that I've spent so much time with them. They've got to know me, and I've got to know them. It's hard portraying myself to them, how I can present myself with complete confidence. They can read that and understand that. They feel it.

“There's never actually been a case where cheetah have killed a person. Of all the predators — lions, leopards, wild dogs, hyenas — cheetahs are the most timid. They would rather run away from something than confront it. Yes, they do bring down antelope and other game. But those animals are running away from them. I don't run away. I present myself in a respectful manner, but also in a confident manner, and they respect that. We have this incredible relationship, which for me just went beyond anything I could ever imagine.”

Being on foot makes all the difference in the world to the resulting film.

“What I'm doing takes it to a totally different level. I spend a lot of time with these animals. Their behaviour then becomes totally natural, far more natural than if I was sitting in a jeep. I think it’s just so much more intimate than you're ever going to get sitting in a vehicle. So what we're trying to do with these cheetah is try to get you into their world. I think it’s something that people are going to engage that much more with.”

Wolhuter is not crazy, though. There are certain predators he wouldn’t dare get that close to, no matter how well he knows their habits or how well he read their emotions.

“Lions. Lions are . . . well, for one, you're not just dealing with one individual. You're dealing with a whole pride. But also, they're just far too big . Lions are incredibly aggressive animals, in that they want to kill anything and everything. Any other predator that steps up, comes anywhere near them, they'll try and kill it. So, you know, they're . . .

“I'm just not going to do it with lions.”

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen