This petition rightly is trying to stop the importation of lion trophies into the UK. But we thought it might be useful to remind us all that lions are also killed because of the human/wildlife conflict on African soil and yet again, lions are the biggest losers. How long can lions cling on to existence with all the many ways lions are regularly killed, decimating the remaining fragile populations?
Here is a report on the situation in Botswana:
Human-carnivore conflict is proposed to be a major cause for the decimation of large carnivores across the world. Especially in Africa, large carnivores have been greatly affected in terms of population number and geographic range decreases – lions, for example have lost over 80% of their former range and LionAid estimates a continental population now of only about 10,000 individuals ( another big reduction from when we launched this petition).
Pastoralists largely blame lions for their livestock losses, but is this true?
This report looks at the situation in Botswana. It should be noted that “conflict” data is mainly kept in what are called “occurrence books” – and they really are paper books where entries are made by department of wildlife employees. There is little if any computerized data available.
What we found was the following for the Chobe district in northern Botswana:
1. From 2007 to 2013, lions, hyenas and leopards killed 1,150 (or so) livestock, including cattle, goats, donkeys and a few horses. We did not include reports of chickens, turkeys, farmed ostriches, dogs etc in that number.
2. Of that total, lions were reported to be responsible for 85% of the losses, leopards for 13%, and hyenas 2%. With some differences in “tastes” – lions killed 93% of cattle, but roughly the same number of goats as leopards. Lions mainly killed larger prey like cows and bulls, while leopards killed mainly goats and calves.
So there you have it, you would say – lions are overwhelmingly to blame for livestock losses in Botswana, and no wonder that pastoralists retaliate by killing them in numbers with poison and bullets.
But not so fast.
In Botswana, the wildlife department relies on incident reports made to their local offices and/or the police (local and national) and rarely goes to check the veracity of the reports. It is therefore highly unlikely that the “right” predator was blamed.
Botswana has a compensation programme for predator damage, which further muddies the waters.
In 1997, the Botswana government decided to remove hyenas from the list of predators for which compensation would be paid. A predictable thing happened. A study conducted by Christian del Valle (MS Thesis, University of Kent) showed that reported attacks by lions rose from 21% to 61% 1995-2003, those by leopards from 11% to 29%, while hyena attacks declined from 52% to 2%. The livestock owners, in other words, took note and significantly altered their reporting to always blame “compensatable” predators.
Then in 2013, the government decided that livestock losses to lions would be compensated at 100% of the value, while other predators remained at 35% value compensation. Again, the results were predictable. Lions were now killing everything, from heifers to horses and donkeys to ducks.
For sure, lions do likely kill much livestock in Botswana, but so do hyenas. We would estimate that hyenas, being much more numerous than lions, would be responsible for a greater share of depredation than lions, and that the early numbers (hyenas 52%, lions 21%) are much more accurate.
If we want to understand the true level of human-carnivore conflict in Botswana, and indeed Africa, wildlife departments responsible for collecting the information need to be much more assiduous and responsible. Unless and until African wildlife departments dust off their incident books and require proper entries into a database accessible to all, levels of conflict and the species responsible will not be able to be properly evaluated or addressed. And that is a real shame given the rapid rate of declines in lions, possibly driven by cases of wilfully mistaken levels of conflict.