Global Geneva
FROM THE FIELD
Lions in Confict
In recent months a number of lion stories hit the news. Writing from southwest Africa, contributing editor Keith Somerville examines the growing problem of lions versus human beings resulting in loss of territory, livestock predation and revenge attacks.
MOST OF THESE REPORTS INVOLVED LIONS IN SMALL safari parks in South
Africa attacking people. One concerned a young woman killed by a lion that had
been habituated to the so-called “lion whisperer”, Kevin Richardson, at the
Dinokeng Game Reserve, near Pretoria. Another was the mauling of British lion
park owner Michael Hodge at his predator centre in Limpopo province, after
which the lion responsible was shot.These stories are all about captive lions but
attract great media attention through a combination of horror at the attack and
subsequent calls for the lions involved not to be shot. Few shed any real light on
the situation of these Big Cats and the very real and continuous confict between
wild lions and communities in African lion range states.hree years ago, the killing
of an old male animal by a trophy hunter – the Cecil the Lion Affair – did put
an international focus on the issues around wild lions, but chiefy concentrated on
eliciting emotive responses attacking the trophy hunting business, without any
serious examination of whether or not it has any role in wildlife conservation.
THE REALITY OF HUMAN-LION CONFLICT
More serious are incidents of lion-human confict with long-term consequences for
both the survival of wild lions and the safety and livelihoods of people in areas
of rural Africa where wild lions still live outside protected national parks or
reserves. In mid-April 2018, 11 lions were poisoned by villagers at Hamkungu, in
Uganda, near the Queen Elizabeth National Park. This was reported in the
Uganda press and some conservation-related media, but did not hit the global
headlines outside the UK’s Guardian (with a preliminary story but no follow-up),
despite the large number of Big Cats killed. Regular incidents like this shed light
on the threats to lions and people and the true nature of human-lion confict, but
this rarely gets international media attention to the issues. National Geographic,
for example, highlighted the lions’ unusual tree-climbing activities as a tourism
attraction and said “humans encroach on their available habitat”. Not much
attention is given to the other side of the lion vs human confict – the killing,
often on a large scale, of cattle and goats by wild lions. On 14th November 2017,
171 goats and donkeys were killed in one incident by a pride of lions at Etendeka
Klipriver in Namibia’s arid Kunene region in the north-west. A week before, 86
livestock were killed by the same pride at Awantapos in the Torra Conservancy
nearby. The lions in the community conservancies and protected areas of
Kunene and Damaraland in Namibia live alongside pastoralists in a very delicate
and easily-upset balance. Lion predation on livestock can trigger what appear to
be revenge killings that threaten the survival of the lion population there.
IMPOVERISHMENT AND CONFLICT MITIGATION
Despite the extent of the killings of livestock and the impoverishment of the
pastoralist families involved, little attention is given to these events beyond the
Namibian media and the websites of desert lion conservationists and researchers
in Namibia. But it is a serious issue and one that will directly affect the survival
of Namibia’s population of desert-adapted lions. The confict problems are not
limited to Namibia and Uganda, but occur across lion range states in Africa
where they have habitat outside or bordering protect areas. In these districts,
lions live side-by-side with long established pastoral communities dependent on
raising cattle, goats and sheep, and using donkeys as beasts of burden. Livestock
owners, many of them small-scale farmers without the funds to invest in
employing cattle herders or building strong enclosures to protect the cattle
at night, coexist with lions, hyenas, leopards and cheetahs in an uneasy
relationship that can easily slip from hostile suspicion into warfare. Cattle graze
freely over vast areas during the day, when they are vulnerable to attack, more
often by cheetah on goats or other small stock. But at night vulnerability
multiplies, with, lions, hyenas and leopards the main threat. In the past, extended
pastoralist families often had herders available in the form of young men and
boys who would tend the cattle during the day and bring them into enclosures at
night. This provided protection and the deterrent effect of people near the
cattle. It did not prevent predation but kept it within bounds and therefore
limit the level of killings of suspected stock raiders. ut as young people, especially
in countries such as Namibia and Botswana where education has improved
hugely in its reach over recent decades, seek work in towns using their new
qualifcations, the pool of cattle herders shrinks and families no longer have young
men available to tend animals. The small-scale farmers cannot afford to employ
cattle herders from outside the family. This means that livestock may be
untended during the day and not brought into secure enclosures at night. The
result has been confict with predators, as lions and other carnivores seize the
opportunity of an easy meal by preying on unprotected, free-roaming or poorly
enclosed animals.
POISONING LIONS BUT ALSO – INADVERTENTLY – OTHER WILDLIFE
The inevitable result is that local herders suffering huge losses kill actual or
suspected livestock raiders. They may be shot, but often are poisoned. This
targets predators returning to carcasses of animals they had previously
killed. But such poison-baiting also annihilates any predator that scavenges from
the carcass, such as innocent lions, hyenas, jackals and vultures. Agricultural
chemicals (pesticides and weed-killers) are freely available to farmers and can be
lethal to wildlife when dead livestock are laced with them. The killing of lions
and other wildlife in this fashion is a serious conservation issue but may also
have an economic effect more serious than the original loss of livestock.
Lamenting the poisoning of the 11 lions that had strayed from Queen Elizabeth
National Park in Uganda, Bashir Hangi, the communications head for the Uganda
Wildlife Authority (UWA), said: “It is a sad day for us as an institution and we
regret that we lost 11 lions at Queen Elizabeth National Park…As a country we
are benefting mostly from nature tourism, so when someone comes and
kills 11 lions, that person is an enemy of the country.” He said the UWA and
police would try to catch the “criminals” who had carried out the act. Tourism
earnings are vital to many countries and lions are a major attraction for dollar-
bearing safari-goers from abroad.
PROSECUTING LION-KILLERS: MAYBE NOT THE BEST OPTION FOR WILDLIFE CONSERVATION
The commitment to prosecuting lion-killers is all well and good, but eradicating
lions in this fashion is not something carried out like ivory poaching, for gain.
It is a response to often devastating economic loss for communities and to prevent
further killings. Prosecution of herders responsible for killing to protect livestock
or avenge a loss criminalizes local people without providing any long-term solution.
If lions are to survive other than as increasingly isolated populations inside
protected areas, they must be allowed to roam, as thousands do, outside protected
areas and to coexist, as they have done for millennia, with local pastoralist
communities. This, rather than prosecution of poor farmers or ever greater
fencing in (or out) of wildlife, must be the answer if both local communities and
wildlife are not to suffer. The eminent mammal and carnivore specialist, Dr
David Macdonald of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) at the
University of Oxford, whose unit oversees the Hwange lion research project which
collared Cecil the Lion, told me the key to the future of a viable lion population
in Africa was the maintenance of the “lion estate”. This is the area over which
lions can move and has to include areas outside national parks and reserves.
Currently there are somewhere between 20,000 and a possible maximum of 35,000
wild lions in Africa. The most likely fgure is around 24,000, believes Amy
Dickman, who directs the Ruaha Carnivore Project in Tanzania. Many of
these lions live wholly or partly outside reserves and are vulnerable to human
hostility but also represent a threat to livestock.
EARLY WARNING SYSTEMS COUPLED WITH SUPPORT FOR COMMUNITY PROJECTS
If lion numbers are to be maintained or increased to avert the threat of
extinction – most seriously in West Africa where fewer than 500 may survive in
isolated population groups – then a variety of measures need to be adopted to
enable more peaceful coexistence. First and foremost are ways of getting local
communities to accept the presence of lions by providing incentives for them not
to kill lions. This can be in the form of working with local communities
to provide early warning systems to deter lion attacks, assisting with the provision
of lion-proof fencing but also channelling funds (usually from NGO, business or
private donors) into community projects such as health centres, veterinary
care for livestock and educational scholarships.In Namibia, Tammy Hoth-Hanssen of
the NGO Africat-North, is heavily involved in similar programmes, especially
warning systems and providing materials for building night-time enclosures that
can resist lions and other predators. When I was in northern Namibia recently,
she told me that these had helped reduce hostility to lions but lot of work was
still to be done in convincing people to enclose their livestock at night and to see
lions as something other than vermin. The Ruaha project, Africat and similar
schemes in Laikipia (Kenya) and Hwange (Zimbabwe) also fund the employment of
lion guardians recruited from local communities to monitor lions, drive them away
from livestock or warn livestock owners of lions in the area. The Botswana
Predator Conservation Trust does similar work, but as one of their researchers,
Cameron Radford, told me when I visited the region in May, they are also trying
out techniques using audio deterrence, consisting of lion-triggered speakers
broadcasting the roaring of dominant lions from the area to scare off young
males, and also painting eyes on the rear end of cows to make lions think they
have been seen. These latter projects are in an early stage and may or may not
have the desired effect. One conservationist to whom I spoke in northern
Botswana was sceptical that they have anything but a marginal effect in reducing
lion predation on stock.
