Once the lions kill domestic animals, they are hunted and killed by farmers, where the process is termed problem animal control.
They may be the kings of the jungle, but lions have been weakened by life in Africa’s parks. Mike Maxwell looks at why numbers have fallen by 90 per cent.
A lion’s roar at close quarters will cause the hairs to stand on your neck and goose bumps to form even on a warm evening. It is the quintessential sound of the African bush after sunset.
It is a territorial statement that a lion makes to let rival males know of its presence, and is both a challenge and warning. Now that warning has taken on a terrible poignancy with a recent report in New Scientist magazine suggesting that the great voice of the wild risks falling quiet forever.
The report pointed to a 90 per cent drop in the African lion population over the past 20 years. A corrosive combination of diminishing habitat, dwindling gene pools increasing susceptibility to disease, the threat of a feline equivalent of AIDS, and terminal encounters with hunters and farmers has taken a devastating toll. The litany of odds stacked against the lion paints a bleak picture.
Dr Laurence Frank, a wildlife biologist at the University of California, warns that populations of all African predators are "plummeting", but says lions are particularly threatened. In the 1980s, estimates of Africa’s lion population stood at 230,000, but now the figure is closer to 23,000.
