Lions will soon be extinct

An iconic species is quietly going extinct, and nobody seems to care much.

African lions are going extinct at a rapid rate, a shocking decline that has received little media attention or public concern. In fact, complacency seems to be the overwhelming response to any reports of their plight.

How serious is the situation? Consider these statistics. In the 1960’s, there were possibly as many as 200,000 lions on the African continent, and interestingly, this was the time that Joy Adamson published her book “Born Free” based on the life of Elsa, a little lion raised by Joy and George. The book became a New York Times bestseller and an eventual Hollywood movie. It was also the time George Schaller published his book “The Serengeti Lion”, the first scientific look at this species. Lions were in the media, but nobody was particularly worried about lion conservation at that time.

In 1996, another report was made available that estimated lion numbers in Africa to be between 30,000 and 100,000. Again nobody paid much attention; surely 100,000 lions was a big number?

The next estimates came in 2002 and 2004, and this time there were two sources. Both were based on “surveys” (mail campaigns and interviews, really), and came up with a minimum of 12,500 and a maximum of about 37,000.

Recent reports from Kenya estimate a further 20-30% decline in that country alone since the 2004 numbers were published. 

Now we have to take action. 200,000 lions in the 1960’s and probably about 20,000 lions now. This is a staggering 90% decline over 50 years.

And still the media and the public remain complacent.

At one time, lions ranged across may parts of Europe – Spain, France, Italy, Turkey, Greece - and then into the Middle East as well, all the way to India. No longer of course, and their past presence is only historically recorded in cave paintings in France, the writings of Herodotus, and ancient hunting tableaux in Iran.
Now, only a handful of lions cling on existence in the Gir Forest in western India, and African lions occur in scattered locations south of the Sahara. For example, there might be as few as 850 lions in all of western Africa. There may actually be only five or six stronghold African lion populations left – three in eastern Africa and two in southern Africa. The total African population? Probably not more than 20,000, down from 200,000 50 years ago. Since those “latest” numbers were gathered in 2002, many countries like Kenya have announced further and significant declines, another 30% in the last 6 years. Organizations that could provide the species with an increased level of conservation protection, such as the IUCN and CITES, remain strangely reticent to any consideration of a change in status from the current “vulnerable” to the more appropriate “endangered”.
What are the main causes for the declines? Not surprisingly, blamed on loss of habitat, decreasing prey abundance, and increasing conflict with humans and domestic animals. Herodotus could have said the same thing about lions in Greece about 2,500 years ago.
Like the stock market, lion numbers will need to find an eventual place of stability. And that could possibly be at a lower number than we have now.  Lions fall squarely in the category of a political species. Livestock owners, whether politicians with big herds or smallholders with a few cows don’t like them. No African living in a rural area where lions still roam outside reserves likes them. Yet lions are acknowledged as important income earners for many African countries through tourism and unfortunately trophy hunting. Hunters disguise their long-term effect under the rug of “sustainable offtake”, but there have been great excesses. For example, in Zimbabwe, CITES records indicate that between 1977 and 2004, 2697 lion trophies were exported. Zimbabwe used to allow hunting of both male and female lions, but in 2004, 1135 lions of all ages and sexes remained in the entire country. That means about 240% of the current lion population was shot as trophies in 27 years.
But even if lion populations are protected within conservation areas, there is another problem. There is a silent issue of lion conservation that concerns some worrisome disease issues.
Two of these diseases currently affecting lions have been introduced and the third is endemic. In terms of introduced diseases, lions were seen to be dying in large numbers in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania in 1994. Overall, about 1,000 lions of the estimated 3,000 Serengeti lions died. The cause? Canine distemper virus (CDV) transmitted from domestic dogs. At about the same time, lions in Kruger National Park in South Africa seemed to be wasting away and dying. The cause? Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) introduced by cattle to wild African buffalos, and via them to the lions. bTB entered the park in the 1960’s, and now a significant number of buffalos are infected in the southern areas of Kruger. Numbers of affected lions are unknown, but significant. Park authorities and scientists are strangely quiet about this outbreak but with the consideration of Transfrontier Parks, are now investigating the consequences on lion populations anew.

The underlying reason why lions might be susceptible to bTB and CDV is because lion populations are infected to a very high level by a strain of feline immunodeficiency virus (FIVple). In the Okavango Delta, Kruger, and Serengeti, places where lion populations have been tested, virtually all adult lions are positive.

For many years, the seriousness of this infection was ignored. Scientists were of the opinion that since the virus had “coevolved” with lion hosts for “many thousands of years”, virus and host had now reached equilibrium. No greater disservice was done to lion conservation. Those same scientists now admit that there are significant consequences to infection, and that infected lions lose immune competence over time, just as humans infected with HIV – it is the same category of virus after all. And FIVfca (the domestic cat virus strain) is a real killer.

The hunting community jumped on the hopeful conclusion that FIV was not a problem for lions. After all, they did not want to admit there might be fragility to the populations from which they were actively earning money. Contributing to the problem is that FIV, unlike CDV, does not fall within the category of an epidemic disease. 95% of individual lions can be infected with FIV, but this does not translate to a mass die-off. FIV affects immune competence. Like humans infected with HIV, that means greater susceptibility to other viruses in the ecosystem. Few humans actually die directly because of the HIV virus. They die of tuberculosis for example, a disease normally resisted by humans with an intact immune system. Lions with weakened immune systems die from CDV and bTV.

There is no cure for FIV among lions. The best we can do is try to prevent domestic dog and cattle viruses from invading their ecosystems, and accept that lions are not only challenged in terms of their survival in terms of area available, but also could exist as immunocompromised populations in need of carefully designed conservation programmes.

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