African Lions Are Going Extinct

But the Endangered Species List won’t help them, says Terry Anderson.

It won’t solve the problem, Anderson explains, to ban the importation of lion trophies or to outlaw hunting in the country of origin. Kenya banned hunting in 1974, yet the lion population there has fallen from 20,000 to 2,000 in just 50 years. Something more than hunting is going on:

The major cause of declining populations is human-lion conflicts and habitat loss. As wildlife biologist Laurence Frank puts it, “For a rural and impoverished people, wildlife is an expensive neighbor unless you’re a hunter who actually lives on wildlife.” Unlike rich animal welfare advocates who buy their meals at the supermarket, subsistence farmers need land for crops and livestock. When they lose livestock to lions, it is not surprising that they poison the predator.

Fortunately there are groups such as Living With Lions trying to find ways to make wildlife an asset rather than a liability. Hunting does this by generating more than $200 million in revenue each year across 23 southern African countries. These revenues generate “green jobs” for guides, trackers, cooks, and support staff. According to a 2012 study in the on-line journal, PloS One, eliminating these revenues could “reduce tolerance for the species among communities where local people benefit from trophy hunting, and may reduce funds available for anti-poaching,”

Hunting is not the only way of making wildlife an asset and reducing the cost of living with them. Jake Grieves-Cook, a tourism entrepreneur in Kenya, owns Porini Camps. He has contracted with Masai herders to remove their cattle from harms way on more than 100,000 acres of land adjoining Masai-Mara National Park. His tented camps employ Masai who, among other service jobs, guard the camp, an important job in a place where the silence of the night is broken by lions roaring. Cook’s private conservancies are home to more than 5 percent of Kenya’s lions.

Groups like Living With Lions work to provide compensation for lion predation and protect people and livestock from the big cats. They build lion-proof bomas or corals to keep the cats away from cattle and sheep at night. Lion Guardians employs 29 Masai warriors to guard livestock on the Southern Olgulului Group Ranch near Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. In South Africa, Cheetah Outreach has a livestock guarding dog program, which uses Anatolian Shepard puppies to scare predators away.

Read “Putting the King of Beasts on Life Support.”

timbercruiser

Tghis concept works for trees, too!
http://www.facebook.com/people/William-Schooler/100003032488972 William Schooler

Is it corporatism? I mean look at the starving there and then look at the lion, now look at the producing American and we are on a big decline in this country and could be extinct in the next couple of years entirely do to Corporatism. I often wonder if its the very same cause all over the world because the results look very similar for sure.
jack

Rest assured – it’s entirely because of statism. Just look around – silly me, you’re blind.
Anonymous

I’m not an anarchist, strictly speaking, and I don’t oppose states protecting an endangered species like the Lion from extinction any more than I oppose states protecting Cherokees or Jews from extinction, even if states also contribute to declines in these populations. Human life is a fundamental right in my politics, and other species should have rights to exist at least in my way of thinking.

I don’t advocate a particular, carefully formulated theory of these rights, and I’m not sure that a state codifying and enforcing these rights is necessary to ensure the continuation of a species like the Lion. This story suggests that outright bans on hunting could have the opposite of the intended effect on Lion populations and that decentralized authorities, like private property holders operating Lion preserves for hunting, could be more effective. i have no fundamental problem with this approach. Of course, Lions routinely hunt and kill Zebra and Wildebeest in these preserves.

As someone with a strong emotional attachment to the idea of Lion survival, the story can only be encouraging, and I wouldn’t mind at all if a Lion preserve allowed men to hunt lions only with their bare hands or weapons constructed with little else. A preserve could even sell rights to watch live contests in which men kill lions or vice versa. After all, the human species doesn’t remotely face extinction.
http://www.TomWoods.com Tom Woods

Martin, the numbers aren’t good when it comes to state success in protecting animal species. I’m pretty sure there have been about 1250 species on the endangered list over the years. About 2% have been taken off the list because they recovered.
Anonymous

I understand the futility of many, statutory efforts to protect endangered species, and a lion hunting preserve restricting the weapons available to hunters, in which lions may kill the men hunting them without interference, is not sarcasm. I’m completely serious. Seems a better reality TV show than Mars One to me. Maybe I’ll propose the idea on Kickstarter.

Many, if not most, people watching the show would root for the lions, of course, and I don’t mind enriching myself this way one bit.
Erasmus

It seems the trend is that they will go extinct. I’m sure resources could be spent to preserve them, but to what end? If the habitat has been so thoroughly destroyed that only 2000 African lions are left, what good are they, anyway? Of what benefit are they to the ecosystem? If they cannot survive in the current ecosystem then they have no function, no reason to be there.