The lion faces extinction in Africa

LION populations have fallen almost 90% over the past 20 years and the animal is close to extinction in Africa, a wildlife expert has warned.

There are now only 23,000 left compared with an estimated 200,000 in the early 1980s, according to Laurence Frank, a wildlife biologist from the University of California.

Interviewed in New Scientist magazine, Dr Frank said: “It’s not just lions. Populations of all African predators are plummeting.”

The wild dog population has fallen to between 3,500 and 5,000 and there are now fewer than 15,000 cheetahs.

“People know about elephants, gorillas and rhinos, but they seem blissfully unaware that these large carnivores are nearing the brink,” he said.

Dr Frank blamed the decline in predator numbers on people killing them to protect livestock.

“People have always killed predators,” he said. “But there’s only so much damage you can do with spears and shields.

“Now everyone has got rifles and poisons.”

His study of the Laikipia region of Kenya convinced him that predators and farmers can co-exist peacefully. Improved fencing and dogs to raise the alarm when predators approach could cut attacks drastically.

However, with each lion killing livestock worth on average 300 a year, equivalent to one cow or three sheep, “bullets and poison are always cheaper than good husbandry”.

Dr Frank said the only solution is for local people to earn money from the predators, either through tourism or, more controversially, through sport hunting.

Trophy hunters will pay around 30,000 to kill a big male lion, he said.

“In Laikipia you could make half a million dollars a year by shooting the problem animals that are going to be killed anyhow.”

US scientist Dr Peter Raven says most animals that we are driving to extinction will vanish without us ever having known they were here. Around one in 10 of all the world’s bird species and a quarter of its mammals are officially listed as threatened with extinction, while up to two-thirds of other animal species are also endangered. These losses have accelerated over the last 200 years as a direct consequence of growth in human populations, wasteful use of natural resources and associated changes to the environment.

Dr Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and Engelmann Professor of Botany at Washington University in St Louis, says there are perhaps 10 million species alive today, of which only 1.5 million have been recognised and named scientifically. Humans know no more than one in six of the Earth’s animal and plant species. “We are likely never to have seen or to be aware of the existence of most of the species we are driving to extinction.”