LIONS, PEOPLE, AND THEIR PREY
By: Catherine Puma
“Africa is not
Africa without lions,” Bernard M. Kissui, African Wildlife Foundation
researcher, once told Smithsonian
staff writer Abigail Tucker. Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park is home to
lion, human and prey populations. Each is interdependent on the others, and
thus it is imperative to understand all three in order to maintain a fair
balance between them. Through the study of Tanzanian government, prey
population fluctuations, and lion history and behavior, wildlife
conservationists may be better prepared to approach the problem of preserving
lion lives. African lion populations are
declining and have been for the past 12,000 years (Tucker, 36). If the
human-lion conflict is not analyzed and the reasons behind it not addressed,
lions will go extinct directly due to human involvement.
Why this conflict
between humans and lions of the Serengeti continues is baffling. Colonial
conservationists only attempted preserving the Tanzanian environment and its
natural resources after World War II, and their efforts met opposition because
they assumed African labor and cooperation were endless (Maddox, 10). And so,
modern wildlife conservationists cannot assume that the African people will
accept every possible solution to their problems. The Tanzanian culture and
government must first be understood in order to gain insight into the way
people live. It is useless telling people to change their lifestyles to
preserve their environment when they have agricultural and poverty issues of
their own to address. Only after we prove to the local communities that we care
about their condition can we teach them how to better care for the wildlife
around them.
The Tanzanian
government is a presidential republic and a multiparty democracy, where the
current president is Jakaya Kikwete. Kikwete is a member of the Revolutionary
Party of Tanzania, which has 259 other members. The other major parties are the
Party for Democracy and Progress and the Civic United Front, which consist of
48 and 34 members, respectfully (Neumann, 9). Since there is such an imbalance
in the representation of each party, there is tension and bitterness between
the groups, which escalates around election times. Surrounding the 2005
elections, there was a series of corruption scandals, which revealed a lack of
governmental honesty and efficiency. During the 2010 elections, however, there
were no corruption scandals of note and the bitter tension between different
parties considerably diminished (Neumann, 11). The uplifting trend in Tanzanian
elections lends hope to the country’s future, and we hope that with this new
confidence in government, conservation problems can be dealt with.
When the “Tanzanian
people” are mentioned, the people living directly around the Serengeti National
Park is being specifically referred to because they are those who need to cope
with the lions the most. Although Serengeti National Park is a designated “safe
haven” for wildlife, a lack of fencing enables the villages nearby and the
wildlife to interact daily. It is impractical to simply scold villagers and
order them to leave the lions living in the Park alone; such a concept would be
similar to telling a neighbor not to worry about the tiger lurking in the woods
behind their backyard. Instead, the village structure must be analyzed in order
to determine ways in which humans and lions can live together instead of
against each other.
The villages surrounding
Serengeti National Park practice some agriculture, but their societies are
mostly centered about their pastoral practices. People raise goats and sheep to
satisfy the necessary protein intake. And while cattle are also raised, they
are rare and thus seen more as a status symbol than a food source, so much so
that the number of cattle is more valuable than the number of wives. A study
done in the early 2000’s which investigated why “bushmeat hunting by
communities adjacent to the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania” occurs states
that young men would begin poaching when they had no other sources of protein,
and the men with livestock and families to support would poach when livestock
was too low to feed his family or to help pay his taxes. Since the men poach
not out of malice but to feed themselves and their families, and there is an
extremely slim chance they will get caught poaching, they do not feel immensely
guilty for their actions (Loibooki, 14). It is difficult to solve this dilemma
with a corrupt government in power, which leaves poverty-stricken villages to
fend for themselves in the middle of the savanna during hard times. While the
government is still weak and inefficient, the villages must solve these
pressing issues on a local level, which can be improved by caring for the
livestock more properly until the corruption stops taking advantage of taxes.
Why members of
livestock in Tanzanian villages die is analyzed to learn how to better care for
them. Causes and rates of mortality show that livestock die more often to
drought and disease than by lion and other carnivore attacks. Fences can
protect against carnivores, but will not prevent multi-host pathogens
transferred from wildlife prey populations to local livestock populations. When
hunting, lions often go after the weaker members of a herd because they are
easier to catch. As such, when a herd is suffering from a contagious disease,
the lions usually take down the infected ones. As with the livestock, prey
populations are more devastated by disease than by predation, which is seen
when herbivores of the Serengeti were held to about one-fifth of their carrying
capacity by repeated outbreaks of rinderpest (Sinclair 1979) whereas predation
had a miniscule impact on these prey (Kruuk 1972 Schaller 1972).
This explains why
predator removal programs implemented in an attempt to increase the prey
population usually fail, because the lions keep the spread of disease in check
within the prey population, which in turn helps prevent livestock from becoming
infected as well. As concluded in Packer’s “Keeping the herds healthy and
alert: implications of predator control for infectious disease”, “By removing
infectious individuals from the wildlife population, predators not only reduce
the force of infection in wildlife, but indirectly reduce the impact of disease
on the domesticated species.” Because the lions benefit both wildlife and
livestock, the local villages should want the lions to continue thriving in the
Serengeti National Park.
Improvements in
agriculture management and practices could benefit the stability of villages,
so the diets of its inhabitants would not rely solely on the health of a few
goats and sheep. Introducing drought-resistant crops and early maturing seeds
would expand productively, increase dependability, and help prevent land
degradation. However, when such answers were attempted, the farmers soon
realized that these new practices lowered profit while increasing necessary
labor and thus raising the costs of production (Maddox, 57). Because taking
care of the environment has been thus far economically unbeneficial, the
Tanzanian people continue their old ways of growing crops so they can at least
feed some of the present generation, even though they know it will harm the land
for future generations. Tanzanians want to replenish the land they so depend
on, but there is no method as of yet that allows them to do such without
sacrificing their own wellbeing. The balance is out of whack and needs to be
put back.
Research performed
to better understand the Serengeti National Park is vital to finding better
solutions for the human-lion conflict of the area. The Tanzania Natural
Resource Forum is one of the major hubs of research, and an add for a research
assistant offered 500,000 tsh per month, which is approximately $290.27 per
month. However, this add was offering such an opportunity to international
applicants. In addition, the Tanzania Natural Resource Forum acquires most of
its funding from international organizations, including but not limited to Ford
Foundation, Wildlife Conservation Society, and WWF (Kissui, 43). If this Forum
and research centers like it instead searched for assistance among locals, they
would help promote caring for the environment among its people and also open
steady jobs to the Tanzanian economy, possibly lowering the need to poach.
Tourism in the
Serengeti National Park is extremely popular because the Serengeti is one of
the biggest natural preserves and holds the biggest lion population left in the
world. However, many of the tourism companies are run by international
investors and organizations, which takes away vital economic opportunities from
the local people. If young men from Tanzanian villages sought jobs in the
tourism industry instead of resorting to poaching, knowledge of Serengeti
National Park and economic opportunities would spread among the human
populations in the surrounding area.
As aforementioned,
One of the reasons why people practice poaching is so they can sell that meat
to pay off their taxes. If research centers like the Tanzania Natural Research
Forum get their funding internationally, then it is confusing to pin-point
exactly where the tax money is going towards among the Tanzanian
infrastructure. The Tanzania Revenue Authority is in charge of collecting and
organizing the tax money. They have laws stating that the employers are in
charge of collecting taxes from their employees, which are then collected from
employers by local officials. However, in light of the corruption scandals of
the 2005 elections, it would not be surprising if the corruption leaked down
from the presidential candidates to the local officials and even all the way
down to the employers. Employees are oftentimes undereducated, and so it would
be easy for their employers to take advantage of their ignorance by collecting
more than they should, and the local officials could take advantage of lack of
knowledge about the tax laws to take more than they should. It is a vicious
cycle that the Tanzanian villagers must suffer for.
While the problems
in Tanzanian government are addressed, lion behavior must also be understood in
order to better predict lion reactions to local human change. Even though
lionesses will often be the ones to perform the hunting in a pride, when juvenile
males wander alone before reigning over their own pride, they hunt animals easy
to bring down on their own (Uhlenbroek, 236). These young males tend to be the
culprits behind most livestock attacks, yet when the local villagers see their
prized animals half-eaten in the dirt, they assume the local alpha male is the
culprit and so kill him in retaliation. This tactic is ineffective because the
alphas keep inexperienced younger lions in check, and when the alpha male is
killed young males flock into his territory to battle for control over the
pride. Such fights cause chaos amongst prides, which makes the lions violent
and scatter in confusion, thus more likely to hunt livestock and attack humans
who wander across their path. Better fences triggered with a second ring of
bells, which alarm when a carnivore tries to climb over the fence should be
implemented to the livestock populations instead of killing every alpha male
lion, which may or may not have hunted a sheep or two.
Whether called Panthera Leo or African lion, the King
of Beasts has been surrounded by a plethora of legend and folklore. However,
recent studies have revealed new discoveries in our understanding of lion
social structure. Lions are the only big cats to travel in large groups called
prides. It was thought by biologists that lions band together to hunt prey, but
the world’s leading lion expert Craig Packer and his colleagues have found that
every aspect of lion social life is centered what he refers to as “the dreadful
enemy”: other lions (Tucker, 25). When lions become adults, females stay with
their mother pride and males are driven away by the alpha male. Prides are
constantly threatened by these young males searching for a pride of their own
to lead. Lionesses create nurseries for defense, because cooperating lionesses
stand a better chance of protecting their cubs against intruding young males,
which will kill cubs from the previous alpha male once they have taken over the
pride. Packer has observed lions banning together to fend off and sometimes
kill intruders. Larger and stronger lion groups rule richer savanna where prey
animals are abundant, and thus most valuable, while smaller and weaker lion
groups are pushed to the barren edges. Only as long as there are people like Packer
defending the lion’s right to survive will we be able to continue learning new
findings of the fascinating lion way of life.
Another lion
discovery has enlightened the evolutionary purpose behind appearance. The lion
is the only cat with a mane, and some believed it was in order to protect the
animal’s neck during fights. However, Craig Packer thought manes might be a
message or status symbol, since lions are also the most social felines. So in
the late 1990’s, he and his team had a Dutch toy company design four life-size
plush lions with light and dark manes of differing lengths. Planted cameras
revealed that females attempted to seduce the dark-maned plushes, while male
lions avoided the dark-maned ones, preferring to attack the shorter light-maned
plushes. With this experiment in mind, Packer’s team then analyzed field data,
and found many males with short manes suffered injury or illness. The
dark-maned males died older, with higher testosterone levels, healed well after
wounding, and sired more surviving cubs, which made them more desirable mates
and more formidable foes (Tucker, 32). Thanks to Packer’s intrigue and his
experiment, we now know a lion’s mane signals vital information on its health
and abilities.
The human-lion
conflict of the Serengeti stems from many sources, both on the local and
national levels in Tanzania. Corruption in government prevents the taxes
collected to be effective in helping the Tanzanian people, and local villagers
kill lions for the wrong reasons, which ensue chaos among the prides, damaging
the health of the wildlife prey populations. Research performed to better
understand the way lions live and think is imperative to learning how they will
react to changes in their environment and the human population. Approaching
such a problem from multiple perspectives in order to cut off the source at its
roots can be implemented with other human-carnivore conflicts around the world,
such as with the tigers of Asia and the wolves of North America.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 - Uhlenbroek, Charlotte Animal Life Dorling Kindersley Limited,
(2011)
2 - Tucker, Abigail “The Truth About
Lions” Smithsonian, (January 2010)
3 - Loibooki, Martin; Hofer,
Heribert; Campbell, Kenneth L. I.; East, Marion L. “Bushmeat hunting by
communities adjacent to the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania: the importance
of livestock ownership and alternative sources of protein and income”
Foundation for Environmental Conservation, (May 2002)
4 - Packer, C.; Holt, R. D.; Hudson,
P. J.; Lafferty, K. D.; Dobson, A. P.; “Keeping the herds healthy and alert:
implications of predator control for infectious disease” Ecology Letters, (2003) 6: 797-802
5 - Holmern, Tomas; Nyahongo,
Julius; Roskaft, Eivin; “Livestock loss caused by predators outside the
Serengeti National Park, Tanzania” Biological
Conservation 135 (2007) 518-526
6 - Packer, Craig; Kissui, Bernard
M. “Managing Human-Lion Conflicts” Transactions of the 72nd North American
Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, E.4-E.18
7 - Maddox, Gregory; Giblin, James;
Kimambo, Isaria N. Custodians of the
Land: Ecology & Culture in the History of Tanzania James Currey Ltd,
(1996)
8 - Packer, C.; Brink, H.; Kissui,
B. M.; Maliti, H.; Kushnir, H.; Caro, T “Effects of Trophy Hunting on Lion and
Leopard Populations in Tanzania” Conservation
Biology, Society for Conservation Biology (2010)
9 - Neumann, R. P. “Political
Ecology of Wildlife Conservation in the Mt. Meru Area of Northeast Tanzania”
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, (1992)
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