Lion Bones

Lion Bones

    It seems awful that one has to have these words in the heading, the reader almost hoping that the words are merely some play on a country song title such as Lyin' Bones.  Unfortunately, as the tiger population continues to plummet, the demand for the supposed aphrodisiac qualities of tigers and their bones and sexual organs has now moved to lions, and with devastating effects. Says conservationist Derek Joubert in an interview with National Geographic: Actually, they’re [marketed] as tiger bones, not lion bones, and used in a ritualized way in wine to celebrate Chinese New Year [because they are thought to have medicinal properties].  The lion-bone trade is a new threat that could have been avoided.  No one bought lion bones until five years ago, when South Africa [began] allowing permits to sell the bones of about 30 animals.  By now it is up to over 1,000 a year.  In an earlier statement from his foundation, he added: Let there be no mistake, we are in the midst of the Battle for Africa right now.  Every nine hours another rhino is killed in South Africa alone.  We lose five elephants an hour across Africa.  In the last 50 years we have managed to lose 95% of our lions and leopards.  At this rate, we can expect extinctions of lions in the next 10 to 15 years.

    The popularized killing of Cecil, the black-maned lion which was supposedly lured by bait out of park boundaries by an American dentist/hunter, elicited this from Joubert's site: The killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe is just one case.  He was baited out of the park at night, blinded by lights and killed on land that was not allowed to have a lion permit, and the hunters lied about the incident and attempted to destroy the research tracking collar.   Zimbabwe supposedly does not allow lion hunting after sunset.   According to our sources, Cecil was one of about 24 lions like this that were recently baited and shot unethically in Zimbabwe...Trophy hunters mostly want to kill male lions.   Of the 20-30,000 lions left, it is considered that 15% of them may be adult males.  That is less than 5,000 adult male lions at best, and most likely only 3,500 male lions and we are allowing the shooting of these lions at a rate of about 600 a year.  This could imply a 20% off take a year and no population can sustain that (even if these were the only lions being taken off each year, excluding poaching, trade, habitat loss.)...Safari Club International has over 50,000 members.  Dallas Safari Club a similar number.  As 64% of those dead lion trophies go into the USA each year, the demand for trophies by these members will naturally outweigh the entire lion population...A male lion hunt sells from $25,000...Some hunters want to kill lionesses, and they sell for $9,000...A rare white lion bred solely for the purpose of being killed sells for $30,000...Additionally we know that killing one lion can lead to the deaths of numerous others – either by the takeover of a pride by new males or the killing of a female who has cubs. (When males lions are shot, their coalition partner (male) is left weaker and unable to defend a territory in many cases and it killed by marauding males, who then kill all the prides cubs.  The estimated tally of dead lions as a result of each hunting license is between 15 and 30.) 

    Much of this brings into call the practice of canned hunting (many such "hunting preserves" are located in the U.S.), a practice where a hunter can shoot and kill an animal which is trapped in a cage or in a confined area and the hunter can then claim the "trophy."  In Africa, some reports of such canned hunting have the animals being hand-raised and released into the "wild" only on the day of the hunt.  Disoriented and unfamiliar with the new world in front of them, the animal usually makes for an easy and sometimes a still, unmoving target.  Dogs are now being used to chase and tree panthers for such hunts in Africa, much as is done in the U.S. in cougar and other types of animal hunts for sport.  

    But away from such trophy hunts, the killing of lions for their supposed aphrodisiac or medicinal prowess is also fueling the decline in their populations, the poaching of such animals now bringing in an estimated $27 billion in illegal monies.  Sometimes, these beliefs are generations old and difficult to dispel; and sometimes, these beliefs are merely fads and fed by misinformation, as was demonstrated with the craze some years ago with shark cartilage.  At the time, since sharks rarely develop cancer, it was believed that taking pills of powdered shark cartilage would slow or prevent cancer in humans (none of this was based on scientific evidence but was heavily marketed by the vitamin and herbal supplement industry)...the result was a massive decline in the shark population, sometimes reaching 90% in certain groups (as a rule, sharks only give birth to a single pup and only after nearly a year of pregnancy...many shark populations have yet to recover).

    The other side of the argument is that the fees that hunters pay for such hunts will help to prevent illegal poaching since hunting brings in more money and thus might prove more lucrative to a government to regulate and conserve its animals.   This is the same argument for conservation lodges and safaris, for the bottom line is who will pay the most to save these animals, whether to simply view them in the wild or to take them home in parts.  For the villagers whose farmland and crops are trampled, their killing of an animal is an issue of survival and the removing of a "pest."  In their case, who will compensate them for their loss (or pay for the fences to keep the animals out)?  And despite our images of Africa being a continent with almost limitless land, the encroachment of cities and villages on migration routes of animals is being heavily felt (and a new goal of many conservation agencies to protect such routes and corridors).  Some consider the loss of habitat the greatest threat to Africa's animals.

    Enter Google, of all companies, donating much of its Earth Outreach mapping program to provide tracking and viewing information to over 8000 NGOs.  Said an article in ELLE: The goal, aside from allowing frontline conservationists to show Google Earth users (the program has been downloaded 2 billion times) what they're fighting for in real time, is to use Google technology to collect hard science—among other things, vector data about elephants' locations collected from GPS collars—to enable activists and scientists to change public opinion, and ultimately government policy, in places such as China, where the ivory trade is thriving.  In the years between 2010 and 2012, the quest for ivory led to the slaughter of around 100,000 elephants, according to a study led by George Wittemyer of Colorado State University...Despite the fact that Douglas-Hamilton describes this as a holocaust for elephants, the tide may be turning in their favor.  Peter Knights's WildAid states that 95 percent of all people surveyed in China's three largest cities now support a ban on ivory trading, perhaps prompting China's forestry authority to destroy nearly 1,500 pounds of tusks and ivory carving in a public ceremony earlier this year.  Might such an approach also help in the protection of lions and other endangered or close-to-endangered animals?

Photo from ELLE article and courtesy of Google Maps

 

     Many sites are working towards the goal of simply maintaining the populations and slowly the killing to at the least, a sustainable level.  But it's worth taking a peek at some of the spectacular photography of one such site, the Great Plains Foundation, working in cooperation with National Geographic's Big Cats Initiative (the opening video of lions in the wild is far different from what you might be used to).  Bringing monies in and changing cultural ideas are massive undertakings, and many groups such as the Black Mambas Anti-Poaching Group are truly hands-on, boots on the ground organizations (and strapped for financial aid).   But all of these efforts, some large and some small, might move the bar just enough to make a difference, maybe not to all of the immediate world, but to the next generation who might not want to look at the extinct lions and elephants as blankly and apathetically as we now look at the passenger pigeon.  There's still time...and we are now a world that is anything but disconnected.  Adds the ELLE article: "I think people tend to do the right thing when they have the right information," says Jake Wall, PhD, the research scientist who developed the real-time monitoring system for STE.  "But we need to reframe the way we look at wildlife.  It is not a commodity for us to use and abuse.  I would like my kid to be able to see an elephant one day.  Not everyone is lucky enough to go on safari, but with Google Street View bringing that into people's living rooms and connecting them to the magnificence of these animals, well, it's not the same as being there, but I hope it's the next best thing."  

    Go check it out, go on a safari, even if it is only (for now, at least) with Google.  You may just want to start on a new mission in life, a new continent, a new destination, a truly new adventure.