End of the line for lion walks

IT hasn’t been a good month for big cat tourism. The Indian Supreme Court ruled against visitors entering tiger protection areas, a decision which the conservation charity Care for the Wild International has welcomed.

A case was taken against local authorities who allow hotels and shops to be built within reserves. It was argued that these, and tourist pressure generally, threaten the 1,600 or so tigers left in India. The court agreed.

Buffer zones are to be created around core areas of the country’s 40 tiger reserves and visitors will be kept out. Tour operators are dismayed. They claim the ban will ruin the wildlife tourist trade and that thousands of jobs will go. The presence of visitors, they say, helps protect wild animals.

Tiger numbers are highest at reserves where there are tourists, who provide a virtual ‘neighbourhood watch’ service, making it difficult for poachers to operate. In out-of-the-way locations with few visitors, tigers are being killed and their body parts sold to the Chinese medicine trade. People cherish wild animals if they are seen to benefit the local economy. Without tourists, there’s no incentive to protect tigers in a crowded, largely impoverished, country where land is at a premium.

Meanwhile, an article in the journal Oryx claims the practice of ‘walking with lions’, which has become popular with tourists in Africa, has no conservation value. Visitors to ‘lion encounter’ establishments are allowed to pet and feed lion cubs. They accompany them on trips into the wild and have their photographs taken. !It’s a lucrative business. A typical Zambian outfit charges $130 per excursion. Volunteer work placements are also on offer. A four-week stint in Zimbabwe, helping with “the world’s leading programme for the release of lions back into the wild”, will cost you around €2,000. Food and accommodation are included but travel expenses are not. No qualifications are needed but “you should be willing to muck in with anything”. The tame cubs are no threat to the walkers. Nor is there a risk that animals will abscond. “The lions don’t walk energetically as they are lazy cats. They love to stop and cuddle,” declares one operator.

The proprietors of these schemes claim that taking animals out on walks is part of the process of returning them to the wild and that money earned from tourists goes towards lion conservation. “Enjoy the exhilaration of being part of the hunt as the young cubs learn to stalk their prey,” proclaims one South African advertisement.

Luke Hunter, president of Panthera, the IUCN cat specialist group, doesn’t agree. A paper entitled ‘Walking with lions: Why there is no role for captive origin lions, Panthera leo, in species restoration’ has been published by him and other experts.

Africa had about 200,000 lions a century ago. There are fewer than 30,000 now. The species has lost 82% of its former range and, in Hunter’s view, “is now on track to share the fate of its distant cousin, the endangered tiger”. The cat is in trouble but releasing captive-bred lions, Hunter and his colleagues argue, is not the way forward. There “have been few successes in reintroducing large cats from captivity to the wild”, they claim. Money is being collected from gullible tourists in lucrative “encounter” operations but not a single lion has been returned to the wild. The claim that by walking with a cub you contribute to conservation is bogus. Releasing captive-raised animals only increases the risks both to lions and humans. These activities distract attention from genuine lion conservation efforts and divert resources which would be much better spent conserving wild populations.

Not that Hunter is opposed to using captive-bred animals per se. The Californian condor, which became extinct in the wild, was successfully reintroduced using captive-bred birds. So, too, was the North American black-footed ferret, once thought to be extinct. Captive breeding programmes have an important role to play in conservation, but the African lion does not need such measures as yet. During the last two decades, more than 500 wild lions have been captured and relocated to about 40 parks across southern Africa. These animals, which have been closely monitored, have fared well at their new locations.

I’m sure Hunter is right but I would love to walk with a lion.