The lion, Africa’s icon, is now down to possibly as few as 25 000 individuals over the entire continent. A major reason is that there is less and less space for them. And, where cattle are around and no trophy hunting is allowed, lions may be regarded as vermin.
In Kenya, where trophy hunting has been banned for a third of a century, there are fewer lions now than in the country’s history. Those that survive probably represent a tenth of the lion’s population in the mid 20th century.
A consensus of expert estimates indicates South Africa’s Kruger Park has up to 2 000 and Etosha in Namibia between 250 and 750. Botswana’s Okavango Delta, which lies more or less in between the two, could have as many as 3 500. The Serengeti Plains, which extend over 30 000 square kilometres (11 600 square miles) from northern Tanzania down to Kenya, have about 2 700 and the Selous Game Reserve around 5 000. The remaining 10 000 or so live outside the big reserves.
The now-illegal East African Maasai ceremony of spearing a lion is well documented. A young Maasai, to prove his courage and to become a moran (warrior), had first to provoke a lion into charging and, as it sprang, plant his spear point uppermost firmly into the ground and guide it in such a way that the lion impaled itself. Later the ceremony became one of communally spearing the lion and the man who first pulled its tail would get the honours. The ceremony, practised openly right up until the second half of last century, was often fatal to the Maasai and occasionally several men would die from wounds and infection. In Zimbabwe there was a cultural ceremony where a Matabele youth would attract a charging lion and then fall beneath his body-length shield and, while the lion tried to tear it away, the other youths would place their assegais against the lion and push them home together. Then they would work them up and down in the wounds. Fatalities among the participants must have been common1.
The spearing of lions, not necessarily ceremonial, still goes on in East Africa2. Kenyan pastoralists, for instance, speared 27 of the 40 lions that were killed in Nairobi National Park in 20033.
A charging lion is a disconcerting sight. Try to imagine the heavy cat standing with black tufted tail flicking and its yellow eyes blazing. Slowly it bounds forward – bounding rather like an enormous dog – and as it draws near it contrives to flatten itself against the ground and for some odd reason appears to shrink in size. It halts and, in a second, gathers itself and leaps forwards and upwards, teeth bared and massive claws unsheathed. The fascinating thing about this action is the bared teeth. Bared teeth are a sign of nervousness and fear. Lions don’t bare their teeth when attacking an antelope or even, in my experience, when tackling an animal twice their size. This could explain why many claim that the charge of a lion can be checked – even without a gun. Guggisberg mentions in Simba that Heinrich Lichtenstein, the 19th-century German zoologist who lived for some time in the Cape, quotes Cape farmers as saying that an unarmed man was in no danger if he
… stared the charging lion in the eye with perfect steadiness and composure … the lion is then supposed to become confused, retreating slowly at first and then faster and faster … Hasty flight by the pursued person, on the other hand, was said invariably to induce the lion to take up the chase, the unfortunate person soon being overtaken and killed … I cannot help feeling that the experiment has not very often been made.
Guggisberg comments on Lichtenstein’s remarks:
The advice was quite well founded … although standing absolutely motionless may not be a complete guarantee of safety, it is certainly much better than running away. On more than one occasion a charging lion has turned aside only a short distance from a hunter who did not move, to chase after one of the hunter’s companions who had lost his head and run away.4
One man who successfully tried the standing-still-and-staring method was George Rushby – the lion pulled up at 15 paces, turned tail and fled5. Lt-Col J.H. Patterson, who wrote The Man-Eaters of Tsavo6, also observed that a charging lion – a normal lion – would stop and slink away if its intended victim stood still and stared.
Pliny the Younger, who, like most of Rome’s intelligentsia, became unhappy about Roman ‘blood sports’ (men pitched against wild animals in the arena), wrote of the lion:
The lion alone of all wild beasts is gentle to those who humble themselves to him and will not touch any such upon their submission, but spares whatever creature lieth prostrate before him. Fell and furious as he is at other times, he discharges his rage upon man before he sets upon woman, and never preys upon babies unless it is from extreme hunger.7
It is all rather fanciful but Conrad Gesner, who wrote Thierbuch in Zurich 1563, is quoted by Guggisberg: ‘So peaceful and mild is the lion, that he does not wound anybody who throws himself on his mercy.’ Tell that to the Christian martyrs who were forced unarmed into the Roman arenas to face lions. Mind you, the lions were first starved. However, there is the story of a Kenyan mother who, in 1960, was walking along a track near her home, carrying one child and leading the other by the hand, when she saw a lioness and her cubs coming towards them. The woman became rooted to the spot. Lionesses are extremely nervous and may be aggressive when they are with cubs. The lioness advanced upon the terrified woman. The lioness stopped just short of the trio and eyed them in that dispassionate way that some lions have. She then returned to her cubs and withdrew them from the track. What made the lioness so apparently empathetic? Perhaps it proves nothing more than, if you stand still when approached by a lion, there’s a good chance it will back off. The average lion certainly does not see humans as a preferred prey species.
Rural Africans have a deep respect for lions. The lion, generally speaking, has an even deeper respect for humans. Even in the mid 20th century in some parts of Africa, men would chase lions from a kill – once they feel that the lions are more or less gorged – and take away the rest of the meat. They probably still do. Pigmy-sized Bushmen will also rush at gorged lions and rob them of meat. An acquaintance, cracking a whip, approached a group of feeding lions. The lions fled.
Lions will usually slink away as soon as they catch the smell of a human. If you stumble on a resting lion in the bushveld, it will invariably scramble to its feet and move off at a fast trot. On one of the early exercises in 1963 to capture and relocate hippos along the drought-stricken Olifants River in the Kruger Park – using drug-darts fired from a shotgun – I witnessed a ranger, who was running through long grass following a darted hippo, run physically into a lion. It is difficult to say who was more startled or who made more noise as they took off in opposite directions.
In the 1970s, while I was attached to a lion-darting-and-tagging team in the Kruger Park’s central region, one night I witnessed rangers dart a pride of more than 20 lions in a group feeding at a carcass wired to a tree. Rangers then had several minutes to ear-tag them before the drug wore off. Some lions were stirring from their tranquillised state and had to have a little extra anaesthetic. This was done by pulling on the sleepy cat’s tail with one hand and using the other to inject into its rump. Somebody asked about the one and only blackmaned lion that had been darted, which had obviously slipped away in the darkness. Armed with a spotlight and preceded by two rangers, I helped in the search. We caught up with the lion and a ranger tried to grab its tail to re-inject it. But the lion moved into a faster trot, all the while looking nervously over its shoulder. After about two minutes we decided it was obviously too wide awake and gave up the chase. Then we heard a shout behind us to say the darted lion had been found close to where the others were. We had been pursuing a perfectly awake lion. It confirmed in my mind that lions will retreat rather than attack when they do not understand a situation – as will most wild animals.
The majority of people killed by lions are killed by being ambushed rather than after a long charge – I am told that three-quarters of lion victims buried in Nairobi Cemetery died in lion ambushes.
There is some evidence that suggests man-eating lions are more likely to attack after full moon and also between sunset and moonrise – bright moonlight not being conducive to successful hunting8.
Panthera leo, the second-largest member of the family Felidae (next to the tiger) can, in exceptional cases, weigh up to a quarter of a tonne – 250 kilograms (550 pounds)9, and measure three metres (10 feet) from nose to tail tip. According to Guggisberg, it has the strength of 10 men and has been seen to clear a four-metre (13-foot) skerm (cattle kraal fence), when driven by desperation, and to cover 12 metres (40 feet) in one bound10.
The savanna down the east side of Central Africa suffers more than any other area when it comes to man-eating and man-killing. Ecologist Professor Craig Packer of Minnesota University – a man who has studied lion behaviour in Tanzania for many years – believes that nowhere is the human-wildlife conflict more of a threat to the lives of both humans and wildlife than in Tanzania, where, he says, lions ‘currently attack over 120 people a year’.
In a 2007 report on HWC published by the FAO is a section dealing with lions, which cites a 2006 research paper by Packer11. The FAO report says:
Since Tanzania is home to the world’s largest lion population, this [HWC] conflict not only threatens human lives but also the country’s economic growth through risks of indiscriminate retaliation against the lions … Between 1990 and 2004 lions killed at least 563 people and injured more than 308. The problem has increased dramatically over the past 15 years with the majority of cases occurring in the southern part of the country where lions enter agricultural areas and villages in search of human prey. Tanzania has the largest remaining population of lions in Africa12. Considering the magnitude of the problem and the emotions it elicits, it is surprising how little is known about carnivore attacks on people … Understanding the context of attacks is crucial for designing effective mitigation strategies to prevent future attacks.
Simple precautions can reduce the risks. Clearing bush and grass near villages deprives lions of cover. The animals are more likely to attack lone people than those walking in groups. Sleeping in fields to protect crops is particularly risky.13
The region has bred such delinquents as the man-eaters of Njombe. Dr Rolf D. Baldus, who directed the GTZ Wildlife Programme in Tanzania until 200514, completed a case study of lions that had killed 35 people in eight villages in the Rufiji district. He is of the opinion that one lion was chiefly responsible for the deaths, though it might have been accompanied by others that were eliminated mainly by snaring early on. The man-eating stopped only after a particular lion was killed15. The episode lasted from August 2002 to April 2004 and the toll surpassed the Tsavo man-eaters, which killed 28 in a similar period of time during 1898–99. They were immortalised in J.H. Patterson’s classic The Man-Eaters of Tsavo16. Rufiji Valley villagers named one of the lions Osama and it was later found to be a young lion that had almost certainly been weaned on human flesh by its mother. The Rufiji killers took men, women and children, often after having broken through the walls of a hut or clawed through the roof. The killings occurred not far from Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, and east of the Selous Game Reserve.
Baldus cites George Rushby who recorded 1 500 people killed by man-eating lions in the Njombe region between 1932 and 1946 in a relatively small area of 2 000 square kilometres (770 square miles).
Forty-two people were killed in 1986 in the Tunduru district on the edge of the Selous Game Reserve – the district game ranger among them. Between July 1994 and September 1995 Baldus mentions 29 people killed and 17 injured in Liwale district south of the Selous Game Reserve. Two years later, between January and November 1997, 17 were killed in Mkuranga less than 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Dar es Salaam. In the Lindi district during 1999 and 2000 at least 24 people were killed and a similar figure injured – all near Lindi airport. Lindi is a coastal town where slaves were taken in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, which again suggests a genetic predisposition for man-eating that goes back to the slave trade. The area is still one of the worst-hit in Africa. The local people have a special drum called Ngula Mtwe (‘a man is eaten’); its sombre beat comprises two short thumps followed by a long one.
Baldus says one common method of attack is to snatch people off their wadungu (platforms in the fields for those guarding their crops from bushpigs at night). He said the victims were virtually ‘presenting themselves as live bait’.
Brian Nicholson, the first warden of the Selous Game Reserve, believed that the Njombe man-eaters were more interested in cattle – they killed around 3 000 – and that most people killed by them were not eaten. There are various calculations about the annual toll taken by lions in the region, which is probably around 200, double the figure offered by Packer.
South of the Ruvuma River separating Tanzania and Mozambique is the province of Cabo Delgado where in 1908 Austin Roberts and Vaughan Kirby hunted down four man-eaters that were said to be eating 20 people a month. In some parts villages were abandoned from time to time when man-eating became really bad, and even the local style of architecture shows certain modifications to allow for persistent man-eaters that might try to rip open a hut to get at the inhabitants.
Over a period of 18 months between 2001 and 2002 lions killed 70 people in Cabo Delgado, mostly around harvest time when villagers tended their crops and slept out in the fields in temporary grass shelters. Lions pull them out while sleeping. Packer found in a case study of 60 victims that, while 13 were killed working in the fields and a dozen were going to or coming from the fields, most victims (35) were attacked in these temporary shelters.17
Jeremy Anderson was at a meeting in an adjacent province, Nampula, in 2002 when a pair of local delegates arrived two hours late. They had spent the night in a tree to escape a man-eater that had eaten four or five people. ‘Let’s go and shoot it,’ somebody suggested. ‘No! No!’ said one of the men. ‘People must just be careful.’ This odd attitude is often expressed because many feel that man-eaters are demons that are immune to bullets and will take revenge if shot at.
One of the worst areas in Central Africa has been the Luangwa Valley in Zambia and central Malawi where in recent years a single lion ate 14 people in a month. East of that region John Taylor shot five man-eaters in a single night after an outbreak of man-eating at Nsungu. He shot three as they tried to tear down the door of a hut18. Apart from Central Africa, there are other areas that, from time to time, become decidedly unhealthy from a man-eating point of view.
The Tsavo area is familiar enough to those who have read Patterson’s The Man-Eaters of Tsavo or have seen the 1996 Paramount movie about the Tsavo lions – The Ghosts and the Darkness. At the end of the 19th century many workers were eaten during the building of the railway from the coast of East Africa through to Nairobi. The Tsavo episode was not by a long chalk the most horrific in modern times – just the most publicised. Some people believe that the series of man-eating was triggered by the number of fever victims whose bodies had been discarded in the bush to save burial. There is also the possibility that the spike in the death toll had to do with the 1890s outbreak of rinderpest that wiped out tens of thousands of ungulates, including livestock, from East Africa right down to South Africa, though the Tsavo area had a history of man-eating long before that, which persists today. A generation ago W. Robert Foran shot four man-eaters in a day near this area after they had killed 50 people in three months. Tsavo’s lions are particularly large and broad of shoulder, after generations of pulling down buffalo.
The Ankole district of Uganda, just west of Lake Victoria, has a bad name. In 1924 in the Sariga area of Ankole, following a rinderpest epidemic, two prides of man-eaters roamed over hundreds of square kilometres, during which period one pride accounted for 84 victims and another for 44. Their depredations spread to Entebbe on the north shore of Victoria. This particular reign of terror ended after 17 lions had been shot. But 14 years later another began. Guggisberg attributed the outbreak to yet another rinderpest epidemic that killed off the lions’ natural prey, forcing the lions to eat cattle and so come into contact with humans. They partly lost their fear of humans and probably began man-eating by accident. Within a year 80 people had been killed and more than half a dozen man-eaters were operating.
One hundred and fifty years ago David Livingstone noted that some areas were notorious for man-eating – and these same areas remain notorious today. I suspect that they were being picketed by man-eaters centuries before Livingstone explored them, the most probable reason being the Arab slave trade. Indeed Livingstone came across a dying woman who had been shot or stabbed by her Arab captor because he felt he had overpaid for her. He found another tied to a tree. For more than three centuries Arab slave traders left tens of thousands of unwanted captives to die around their sacked villages and thousands more were left to die along the well-beaten slave trails. Practically all of them were consumed by lions, leopards and hyaenas. And, as the Arabs were taking only the cream of men, women and children, the few old men or sick villagers left behind were powerless to keep the wild animals at bay. Man-eating became habitual among the big cats and, in parts, frequent episodes of man-eating continue. John Taylor observed that on the Revugwi River near its confluence with the Zambezi one could shoot out all man-eaters but sooner or later they would reappear, suggesting a genetic predisposition19. There are, of course, several other contributory factors, for instance the rainy season. When the monsoons come and the grass grows too high for the lion to hunt its normal prey, some turn to killing cattle and sometimes people. Another factor is the disappearance of the lion’s normal prey through hunting, snaring and veld fires. In so many studies it has been suggested that two of the best ways to ameliorate the lion versus human situation is to improve the corralling of cattle at night and to avoid an overkill of antelope and small mammals, which lions prefer to humans.
A contributing reason for man-eating must be the custom some East African tribes have of not burying their dead, but leaving them in the veld to be disposed of by wild animals. The Maasai sometimes wrap bodies in hide smeared with ox blood and fat, to ensure they are quickly found and eaten – usually by hyaenas – because there is shame attached to families whose dead are ignored. These days the Maasai sometimes bury their dead, but in general burial is reserved for chiefs, while the common people are simply left outdoors20. Sometimes the lion that doesn’t turn its nose up at eating carrion gets there first and acquires a taste for people. Man-eating frequently flares up after human catastrophes such as wars or epidemics when dead or dying people can be abundant. Man-eating lions were extremely rare in the Kruger Park until Mozambique’s internecine war after the 1960s Portuguese revolution21 when refugees from the former Portuguese colony began crossing through the Kruger Park at night to seek sanctuary in South Africa. The 2009 FAO report says, ‘Nobody knows how many stragglers were eaten but it is likely to have been scores or even a few hundred.’22
In 1998 a ranger found 11-year-old Emelda Nkuna wandering in the bush near Punda Maria. The Telegraph reported:
Officials and rangers in Kruger National Park are concerned over the frequent attacks by lions on Mozambicans trying to get into South Africa in search of work. Illegals, on foot in unfamiliar territory, have no defence against the big cats, especially at night when the animals are on the hunt.
Last year field rangers became concerned for their own safety after five illegal immigrants were killed by lions in the north of the Park close to Punda Maria camp. At one point, three illegals were killed within three weeks. The cats seemed to have developed a taste for the flesh of easy human prey so seven of the man-eaters had to be destroyed.
‘One of the lions was emaciated and was most likely to attack people,’ explained the Park’s General Manager of Nature Conservation, Dr Willem Gertenbach. Gruesome pictures of the lion’s stomach contents show the remains of human hands, fingers and tongues. Bits of clothing and a wallet were also found. Gertenbach warned that the lions should not, however, be demonised. They were acting naturally in their own habitat.
The horrors of a lion attack were etched into the face of an 11-year-old girl found in the bush near Punda Maria early last month. Emelda Nkuna was lucky – the attacks are rarely discovered as there are seldom survivors and hyenas eat what remains of the victims. ‘There is a very good possibility that many more refugees have died because sometimes we find abandoned luggage and torn clothes, but we don’t find bodies, not with the hyena population in the Park,’ explained Gertenbach.
Last year, two illegal Mozambicans died in a Northern [now Limpopo] Province hospital after being trampled by elephants. Countless others were killed and eaten by crocodiles while crossing rivers. But it is the frequent lion attacks in the north of the Park that concern park officials most. ‘Once lions lose their natural fear of humans, they become a danger to our own field rangers,’ explained Gertenbach.23
It is significant that a great many hunters describe man-eaters as being in good condition. South African ranger Peter Turnbull-Kemp, quoted by Robert Caputo, found 91 per cent of man-eaters (he researched 89 cases) were in ‘good’ to ‘fair’ condition. Only 4.4 per cent were aged or injured24. The Njombe man-eaters were healthy specimens. In Uganda, out of 275 lion attacks described, 86 per cent were the work of healthy lions25. The theory that most man-eaters are too old or crippled to hunt game has long been abandoned. Sick lions do turn man-eater and may remain man-eaters even if they recover, but it is not as important a factor as many believed. A number of man-eaters have hunted no other quarry but humans – they were weaned on human flesh and taught the art of stalking men. These can be the most difficult to hunt and some are never caught and die of old age.
Many man-eaters display idiosyncrasies that are not found in ‘normal’ lions. One of the most pronounced is their habit of moving as far as possible away from the kill before dawn. They might cover 30 kilometres (18 miles) after eating a victim, ranging over hundreds of square kilometres. It is difficult to know whether they do this because they realise it must make it almost impossible to pin them down or whether it is because, having struck at a village once, there is little chance of catching another victim so easily. Although the Njombe lions killed 1 500 humans and also preyed upon 3 000 cattle, some man-eaters are reluctant to eat anything but human flesh and may show enormous patience in seeking it. This is in contrast to the tiger in India where even the most notorious man-eaters will frequently switch to other prey. Perhaps the oddest characteristic of all is the extraordinary lengths to which lions go to get a particular victim. They will step right over a sleeping man in order to get at one beyond him. Ionides wonders whether it is a difference in each man’s smell. He claims lions show a preference for black people rather than white and that in selecting a victim lions tend to ignore whites26. Does this strengthen the theory that the African lion is genetically predisposed after centuries, millennia in fact, towards eating Africans? This possible predisposition was born out during the Chirundu man-eating episode in Zimbabwe, which is described later.
Quite often, once a lion has set its sight upon a particular victim, it will attempt to tear down doors to get at that person. Burning torches and shouting will not deter it. Ionides describes how, in Kenya, a man-eater entered a ring of blazing fires to snatch up a sleeping man, and there are many stories of lions going to some pains to snatch a particular man. Taylor describes how in Kenya a man cycled down a hill straight in between two man-eaters but, ignoring him, they pulled down the cyclist behind him and ate him. Guggisberg gives another example: a man near Fort Mangoche, Malawi, was attacked outside his hut, which was isolated from the village. His wife rushed at the lion with a firebrand and the lion dropped the man. The woman dragged her husband inside and bolted the door, but he died a few minutes later. Meanwhile the lion was attacking the door, trying to tear it away. The woman picked up a firebrand once more and rushed out into the night. The lion re-entered the hut and carried off the dead man.
Ionides describes how stealthily a lion can select a victim. Heinedi Ngoe, his tracker, was given a break from hunting a man-killer in Tanzania. The lion was held responsible for the death of 43 people and the hunt for it had been long and arduous. Ngoe, who decided to take advantage of his break to get married, became victim number 44 and, although he was snatched as he lay beside his sleeping bride, nobody heard a thing. The alarm was raised by the bride who woke up during the night to find her husband no longer with her. As she felt for him she discovered his pillow was blood-soaked. She screamed and villagers had to restrain her from going into the bush to find Ngoe. Next morning, by reading the tracks, Ionides deduced that the lion had waited just outside the village for a considerable time with its victim before going deeper into the bush to devour him.
A classic incident, which again illustrates the tenacity and unnerving cunning of a man-eating lion, happened in June 1900 when a man-eater entered Kima Station in the Congo, west of Africa’s Great Lakes system. The lion attempted to tear through the corrugated iron roof of a station building and eventually succeeded in carrying off a railway worker. Later the same cat tried to ambush a railway driver, but the man managed to squeeze into a galvanised iron tank. For several minutes the lion tried to hook him out by placing its paw through a hole like a bear at a honey pot. Superintendent Ryall of the Railway Police decided to have a try at shooting it and had his personal railway carriage shunted into the siding. Two others joined him: Hübner and Parenti. The three men occupied one compartment. Ryall took first watch sitting on a bunk in the compartment and keeping watch through the open window. The two others slept, Parenti on the floor and Hübner on a bunk above Ryall. Ryall must have nodded off to sleep. The lion, either through luck or incredible intelligence, entered the carriage undetected at one end, padded softly down the corridor and slid the door open. Hübner woke up and saw the lion below him straddling Parenti, who was lying motionless but awake. The lion reached across the compartment, swiped Ryall across the side of the head (probably killing him instantly) and then sank its fangs into his chest near the left armpit. Hübner leapt over the lion’s back and tried to escape through the sliding door leading into the corridor, but frantic people, knowing what was inside, were keeping it shut. Suddenly there was a crash and Hübner looked over his shoulder to see the lion leap through the open window with Ryall in its jaws. Parenti, who had been trapped under the lion, also leapt out of the window. The man-eater was later caught in a trap and was put on show, before being shot a day or so later.
It is most unusual to find a successful man-eater careless enough to get itself caught in a trap. Usually they are extremely wary and display an uncanny anticipation. It is vital when hunting a man-eater to hunt it down quickly – if the first few attempts to kill it are abortive, then the lion will most likely have learned some valuable lessons in evasion. Successive failures do worse than that; they tend to encourage locals to believe even more fervently than before that the man-eaters are under the orders of the witchdoctors and are immune to efforts to kill them. Doubtless these beliefs go back centuries and perhaps millennia. They are a very real handicap to the authorities and lead local people to refuse to cooperate, in case the bewitched lions come for them. They will even go so far as to erase the spoor so that hunters cannot follow it. They reason that by doing so the man-eater, out of gratitude, will grant them immunity.
No book gives as vivid a description of the terror created by man-eating lions as The Man-Eaters of Tsavo. Patterson’s book immortalised its author as the man who rid the Tsavo railway of a pair of particularly notorious man-eaters, which, at the peak of their career, were cause for comment in the British House of Commons. Patterson describes a typical raid, which also serves to show the absolute fearlessness of some man-eaters:
… the two brutes made a most ferocious attack on the largest camp in the section, which for safety’s sake was situated within a stone’s throw of Tsavo Station and close to a Permanent Way Inspector’s iron hut. Suddenly, in the dead of night, the two man-eaters burst in among the terrified workmen, and even from my boma, some distance away, I could plainly hear the panic-stricken shrieking of the workers. Then followed cries of ‘They’ve taken him; they’ve taken him’ as the brutes carried off their unfortunate victim and began their horrible feast close beside the camp. The Inspector, Mr Dalgairns, fired over fifty shots in the direction in which he heard the lions, but they were not to be frightened and calmly lay there until their meal was finished.
In the morning Patterson and some others set off to track the lions. Dalgairns believed he had wounded one and pointed to a dragging trail, which could have been a lion’s foot.
After some careful stalking, we suddenly found ourselves in the vicinity of the lions, and were greeted with ominous growlings. Cautiously advancing and pushing the bushes aside, we saw in the gloom what we at first took to be a lion cub; closer inspection showed it to be the remains of the unfortunate worker which the man-eaters had evidently abandoned at our approach. The legs, one arm and half the body had been eaten, and it was the stiff fingers of the other arm trailing along the sand which had left the marks we had taken to be the trail of a wounded lion.
The lions got away and the Indian workers went on strike. Work on the Tsavo Railway came to a standstill and the killings continued night after night.
Soon after this Patterson called in a hunter named Whitehead who, on the night he arrived at Tsavo, was ambushed by a lion that clawed his back in the darkness. Whitehead’s gun went off in the fracas and the lion switched its attack to Whitehead’s askari, Abdullah. ‘Eh, Bwana, Simba!’ (Oh, boss, lion!) was all the askari had time to say before he was dragged off and eaten.
The following night Patterson sat up in a very rickety machan, four metres (13 feet) from the ground. It was dark and the silence was absolute.
A deep long drawn sigh – sure sign of hunger – came up from the bushes and the rustling commenced again as [the lion] cautiously advanced. In a moment or two a sudden stop, followed by an angry growl, told me that my presence had been noticed and I began to fear that disappointment awaited me once more. But no; matters quickly took an unexpected turn. The hunter became the hunted; and instead of either making off or coming for the bait (a donkey) prepared for him, the lion began stealthily to stalk me! For about two hours he horrified me by slowly creeping round and round my crazy structure, gradually edging his way nearer and nearer. Every moment I expected him to rush it … I began to feel distinctly ‘creepy’ and heartily repented my folly in having placed myself in such a dangerous position. I kept perfectly still, however, hardly daring even to blink my eyes; but the long continued strain was telling on my nerves …27
Patterson then felt a blow behind the head, which terrified him beyond words. It was an owl but his involuntary start caused the lion to growl. It now began to advance on the hunter. ‘I could barely make out his form … I took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot was at once followed by a most terrific roar, and then I could hear him leaping about in all directions.’ The lion bounded off but was not far away when Patterson heard it plunging about. He sent more shots after it and silence returned. The first man-eater of Tsavo was dead and as Patterson shouted the news from his machan hundreds of Indians in nearby camps yelled ‘Mabarak! Mabarak!’ (Saviour). The lion was an excellent specimen measuring ‘9 feet 8 inches’ (about three metres), which is about the maximum for a lion.
It is interesting that Patterson lured one of the notorious pair by using a donkey as bait and the second one by using a goat. In other words, like man-eating tigers, some man-eating lions may vary their diet.
In Zimbabwe a pride of lions specialised in cyclists. Prides have been known to prefer to tackle giraffes and there’s a pride in East Africa that specialises in killing elephants. Another lion population has adopted the strange habit of sleeping in trees. Such specialisations – whether for climbing trees or man-eating – are handed down for generations.
A healthy lion that has become a man-eater would need a minimum of 40 victims a year in order to stay alive. In Malawi one was known to have eaten 14 people in a month, which would work out at approximately 168 a year. But many people killed by lions are not eaten and man-eaters do not always get the chance to eat a victim completely. Ionides mentions one that ate a fat woman and then ate a warthog ‘for dessert’. Ionides, who shot 40 lions in his day (of which more than half were man-eaters), shot this one as it slept off its meal. Individual lions have killed as many as three people in a single night and fed off them. A person who has never seen a wild lion will find it difficult to appreciate how enormously powerful they are. To a cat powerful enough to kill a buffalo, a man is small fry; lions have been known to carry victims for a couple of kilometres without rest. One judiciously placed bite – usually in the head or neck – kills instantly, as does a swipe of its great pad, which can break an ox’s neck. Lions have leapt over and even through thorn fences, carrying victims in their jaws.
Patterson gives a vivid account of the strength of the lion in his Tsavo saga:
The lion managed to get its head in below the canvas, seized a man by the foot and pulled him out [of the tent]. In desperation the unfortunate water-carrier clutched hold of a heavy box in a vain attempt to prevent himself being carried off, and dragged it with him until he was forced to let go by its being stopped by the side of the tent. He then caught hold of a tent rope and clung tightly to it until it broke. As soon as the lion managed to get him clear of the tent, he sprang at his throat and after a few vicious shakes the poor bhisti’s [water-carrier’s] agonizing cries were silenced forever. The brute then seized him in his mouth, like a huge cat with a mouse, and ran up and down the boma looking for a weak spot to break out. This he presently found and plunged into, dragging his victim with him and leaving shreds of torn cloth and flesh as ghastly evidence of his passage through the thorns.
Patterson describes how this lion showed complete disdain for fire and human shouts, since he ate his meal in the light of the camp fires, leaving only the skull, jaws, a few large bones and two fingers.
Man-eaters, unless harried, leave little behind. When children are their victims, the lion eats all except the skull cap, which is licked clean. All other bones are usually eaten. In the case of adults, skull and jaws are usually left, as are the soles of the feet or boots (usually with the feet still in them) and bones such as femurs and the hips. The meat is cleaned from these larger bones by the cat’s rasp-like tongue.
Quite as chilling as the Tsavo episode is the story behind the man-eaters of Chirundu just below Kariba Dam. It was revived in 2001 when ‘Ganyana’, in the professional hunters’ magazine African Sporting Gazette (now African Hunting Gazette), gave a graphic description. The setting is the 30-kilometre-wide (18-mile) floodplain on the Zambezi where, even today, man-eaters take their toll. I was near there, upstream in Kariba Gorge, in July 1999 and in the night heard lions in the hills. I learned the next day that a 19-year-old English tourist from Luton had left his tent open and had been woken by a lion; he ran from his tent and was pulled down by 12 lions, which began to eat him. The game guard, who had only a side arm, chased the lions off by driving a Land Rover at them.
In 1936/37 the present suspension bridge across the river carrying the A1 route from Harare to Lusaka was built. There was a custom among the locals in the vicinity of Chirundu Hill of leaving the dead outside the villages ‘to be buried by the hyaenas’, which, of course, also attracted lions. According to Ganyana the situation was compounded in those days by the custom of even tying up aged people and criminals who had become a burden and leaving them in a bone yard for the ‘demons’. All lions were believed to be spirits that were bullet proof and must be appeased, not hunted. Lions that eat antelope were good spirits while man-eaters were demons.
During the summer of 1936, while labourers cut a path to the site from nearby Chirundu Hill, there had been plenty of lion incidents but no workers were killed. Then in May 1937 a surveyor who had tried shooting a lion was mauled and died of septicaemia. A nightmare followed.
The bridge builders had just moved in. On 3 May the BSAP28 drafted Trooper Hewlett and a constable to the project. On their first night in camp the constable was taken by a lion and Hewlett, hearing the lion eating, lit a hurricane lamp and, without taking a gun, stepped outside. He too was eaten. A week later, when a lion and lioness took a surveyor, fear began to grip the camp. That same night workers managed to fight off a lion by using axes and spades. Thorn fences were thrown up and each dawn revealed the spoor of lions that had circled the camp during the night, seeking a way in. On 15 May a lion found a weak point and snatched a night watchman. Two days later a black-maned lion took a man. The next day half the workers left. On 20 May skilled and semi-skilled workers recruited from the currently depressed mines in Johannesburg arrived. Many were semi-urbanised and had no clue about the wilds. Ganyana says, ‘The lions had a field day and by the end of the week there were 17 dead.’
Three professional hunters were brought in and offered a £10 bounty for each lion killed. By the end of May one had been eaten, a second mauled and was dying of septicaemia and the third was dying from malaria. The head of a nearby Seventh Day Adventist mission, Dr Frazer, calculated that if he killed the man-eaters the locals would stop believing in demons and turn to his church. He looked after his hospital during the day and spent the night sitting against a baobab tree to obviate being attacked from behind. He sat there uttering the cries of a dying man. He had no lamp and, with so little visibility, he had to wait until the lion was within 10 metres (33 feet) before firing. A problem was that hyaenas, expecting to snatch a meal, would approach him and, not wanting to make a noise, he had to swing at them with his rifle butt. They retreated.
‘In the attacks on the labourers it had been noted that all the killings could be attributed to … a very huge black-maned lion and a much slimmer beast with a limp.’ The slim lion had been seen with a female and it was feared they would raise more man-eaters. In the first three nights Frazer shot three man-eaters but the killings went on. On the fourth night Frazer, not surprisingly, dozed off and was woken by a lion grabbing his boot and dragging him away. He managed to reach out and grab his rifle. He fired but missed. The lion retreated.
Frazer took a couple of days off, only to hear the black-maned lion had eaten the bridge engineer. The locals were now convinced that Nyaminyami – the river god – was behind it all and that killing the lions was merely making things worse. They took to sleeping in the baobab trees while the Johannesburg artisans dug ditches and placed iron girders over the top, 30 centimetres (one foot) apart. Nightly they cowered as lions barely an arm’s length above their heads tried to drag the girders apart.
A lion was shot on the girders and troopers in the baobab trees shot two more dead. A jobless Scots prospector, Jock, arrived with a pump-action weapon and was offered £20 a lion tail and £100 for the black-maned or his mate. In two weeks Jock collected nine bounties ‘but nearly a score of men had been eaten in the same period’. On 14 June the black-maned lion killed a man who was securing the gate for the night and the next day Jock, accompanied by a police trooper, followed its tracks for 35 kilometres (22 miles). They found the remains of an old woman and decided to camp on the trail to intercept the lion, assuming it would return to Chirundu. But it was already nearly at Chirundu. Even as they waited the black-maned lion killed and ate two men five kilometres (three miles) from the camp. It then made the odd mistake of sleeping under a nearby tree where, with a single shot, Jock killed it. By now he’d made as much money as he would have done in two years of prospecting, so he upped and left.
On 15 June Frazer came back ‘determined to prove to the Batokas [the local people] that God would triumph and their river demon and his feline cohorts could not stop the bridge let alone the road’. On 16 June Frazer, on his motorcycle, caught sight of a lioness stalking a labourer and shouted a warning. He managed to fire a shot, giving the man a chance to scale a very inadequate tree. The lioness and a male began circling the tree and trying to claw the man out of it. Frazer killed her with one shot but the male came for him. Strangely it didn’t move nearly as fast as he expected. When the lion was 10 metres (33 feet) away Frazer dropped him. He found the lion had an old but serious injury to a back leg – this was the notorious companion of the black-maned lion.
Great celebrations followed. Thirty lions had been killed and for days nobody was eaten. Workers became lax about their defences and more lions moved in from outside. Before the bridge was completed and the road to Zambia finished, 17 more men were to die and 11 more lions.
Ganyana says, ‘The story does not completely end in 1938. Every year thereafter travellers on the road ended up as meals for passing lions.’29
Guggisberg points out how prompt action can on occasion save a man-eater’s prey. The victim might remain alive for some time after being carried off. However, there was a case involving a priest in German East Africa who called – in vain – for 15 minutes while literally being eaten alive. He tells of a man who stood by helplessly when a villager was dragged screaming into the bush by a man-eater. He and some volunteers advanced on the lion, which, with determined charges, drove them back time and time again. All the time the victim moaned for help or screamed when the harried lion fed. Next day his abandoned body was found intact except for a thigh and calf.
It has often been said that a lion’s victims feel nothing. David Livingstone, who was attacked by a lion in Botswana, described it thus:
… growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier does a rat. The shock produced a stupor … a sort of dreaminess in which there was no sense of pain or feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening. It was like what patients partially under the influence of chloroform describe, who see all the operation, but feel not the knife … This singular condition was not the result of any mental process. The shake annihilated fear and allowed no sense of horror in looking round at the beast.30
Guggisberg quotes the Hungarian naturalist Kittenberger who was badly mauled in Tanzania as saying he felt ‘no pain at all’. Others have repeated similar sensations. On the other hand C. Cronje Wilmot, a Namaqualand tsetse control officer, who was mauled and wounded 23 times in one attack, records feeling intense pain. Arnold Weinholt and Petrus Jacobs who were both attacked at different times recall terrible pain – ‘like having nine-inch nails driven into you’, said Weinholt.
A great deal of man-eating on the African continent is done by prides of lions rather than solitary lions. The Njombe man-eaters numbered 15, the Ankole man-eaters even more. The Tsavo killers, including the notorious pair, numbered eight.
The Njombe man-eaters, shot out in 1947 by George Rushby, were slightly smaller than average and their pelts were ‘glossier and more luxuriant than those of lean, hard-working game-hunting lions’31. These lions, referred to in some records as the ‘Ubena man-eaters’, operated in the vicinity of the northern tip of Lake Malawi. They first made an appearance in 1932 and by the beginning of World War II were moving about in three or four small prides. In the game area under Rushby’s administration they killed 96 people in 1941, 67 in 1942 and then another 86 before their reign of terror ended. During this period, records Rushby, they were killing at a heavier rate in a second area and at a lower rate in the third. ‘The renowned man-eaters of Tsavo were small fry in comparison.’
Rushby was transferred to Mbeya in the Southern Province of Tanzania in 1946 and almost immediately received a telegram from W. Wenban-Smith, the Njombe District Commissioner. It read: ‘I beg you to apply earliest attention to man-eaters. Conditions in this district pathetic.’ Along the short Njombe section of the Great North Road 17 road workers had been eaten. The villagers had evolved ‘a negative form of defence’ by drawing into larger communities and abandoning the smaller villages. But the human toll did not decline and incredibly, during the 14 years of man-eating, not a single lion had been shot in the Njombe area.
An incident typical of the Njombe district at the time was when a lion rushed into Rujewa village, bowling people over as it went, and grabbed a woman as her husband stood frozen with shock. Without apparent effort it carried her in its jaws to a group of lions waiting on the perimeter of the village. They ate the woman in a thicket. The husband, armed with an antique rifle, was one of the few brave enough to go after the lions, but as the party drew near the thicket he came face to face with a lioness that was carrying his wife’s leg. He was so shaken that he could not fire and the lioness walked off.
The man-eaters were adept at killing humans and usually did so by breaking their victim’s necks with single bites.
Rushby tried every ruse imaginable to kill the lions, but each one failed, including a series of cunning traps. Because of the already strong local suspicions regarding magic, Rushby realised the importance of quick success. The problem with traps was that they had to be baited with the meat that the lions like best – human meat. But, even if some flesh could be found, it was difficult to gauge where to set the traps, knowing that the lions would wander off a dozen kilometres (seven miles) in any direction by the next day. Rushby had his first opportunity when a messenger brought news that lions had attacked the village of Mambego, 80 kilometres (50 miles) from where he had anticipated them striking. Two villagers had been taken. Rushby, tired from three futile hunts, raced to Mambego and followed the spoor of a lioness, which he shot with four bullets. She did not necessarily need four bullets; it was just that this one ‘had to be dead’ said Rushby. Three more man-eaters were bagged soon after, but the toll of human life did not appear to drop; nevertheless the four dead man-eaters encouraged tribesmen to take up the hunt and massed hunts began. These had an immediate effect upon the death toll. It rose. Villagers, firing wildly, killed no lions but managed to kill three of their own numbers.
By 1947 the lion’s human toll was markedly falling, except in one area where the lions appeared to be making one last stand. Rushby, splitting his best helpers into pairs, combed the bush and shot a male and female. It seemed to be all over, when suddenly a woman was eaten. Two more lionesses were flushed out and shot.
In all 15 man-eaters were shot in the Njombe district, two were injured (probably mortally) and five other lions – probably not man-eaters – were shot. The man-eaters had been responsible for what Rushby described as ‘without doubt the greatest and most sustained record of man-eating ever known in Africa’ – in modern times at least. The hunt had lasted 15 months and in as many years successive generations of killers had eaten an estimated 1 500 people.
In Africa there is a firm belief among tourists and even professional hunters that lions will never attack a person in a car. The belief has largely grown up with the advent of game reserves where people can sit in their cars, with open windows, within touching distance of lions, or even sit in the middle of a pride in an open bush vehicle. The lions ignore vehicles and their passengers and sometimes use vehicles as a means of ambushing antelope. The petrol fumes mask the predators’ scent.
In March 1962 the theory received a setback when Frederick van Wyk and Ronald Holloway were attacked as they slept in their car less than a kilometre south of the Chirundu Bridge over the Zambezi, between Kariba Dam and their home town Lusaka. They were severely mauled as they fought the lion inside the car. They finally managed to slam the door on its body, causing it to retreat. The incident is not unique. T. Murray Smith was arriving with the Maharajah of Jodpur in an open truck near Lake Manyara, Tanzania, when a lion sprang onto the bonnet and smashed the windscreen. The Maharajah shot it through the brain at point-blank range. Robert Caputo mentions how the American lion expert Craig Packer, rounding a corner in a minivan with some tourists, ran up against a pair of Tsavo lions mating. The male immediately charged the van and smashed two of the windows. Nobody was hurt. Lions sometimes jump onto cars and peer at the occupants through the windscreen. It is difficult to say what their motive is. Probably curiosity.
Westerners try to frighten themselves with such fictitious horrors as vampire bats or werewolves, but not even the top horror writers can dream up something to equal the real-life horrors suffered by Africans who are victims of the watuSimba – lycanthropy. It is a form of black magic in which people take on the shape of animals. It is found in various forms up and down the length of tropical Africa but, for some reason it is and always has been particularly prevalent in the Central Province of Tanzania.
In 1920 the police in the Singida district combed the bush and villages for the killers of more than 200 people. Scores of clawed bodies, thought at first to be victims of man-eaters, were found to have been stabbed and then clawed. W. Hichens, who shot the real man-eaters, described how he was stalking a lion when he came across a youth wearing a lion skin. The youth, drugged to a point of insanity, wore gloves to which lion claws were attached and carried long stabbing knives. Even where genuine man-eaters were about, people paid protection money to witchdoctors, believing them to be in control. Taylor refers to the same outbreak of lycanthropy and says there were actually 11 man-eating lions and that the witchdoctors took advantage of their presence. Those ‘in the know’ were able to hire the lion-men to settle old scores and then the relatives of the victims would be approached and they, in turn, could hire the killers for a revenge killing. Over a period some of the lion-men were caught and hanged by the colonial authorities.
In 1946 things came to a head again when, a little further south nearer Singida village, 30 locals were murdered by watuSimba. One victim, a woman, managed to run for her life and described to the authorities how she had been attacked by a youth wearing a skin. When she had fully recovered she changed her story and said she had been clawed by a real lion. In January of the following year 53 Africans were rounded up by the police and eight of them were charged with running the lion-men ring. They appeared in Dodoma court. Because the lion-men (the actual killers in the field) were still under their masters’ spells, the killings continued and, before the month was out, 10 more people died.
There seemed little doubt that the witchdoctors had also attempted to train real lions and hyaenas to be man-eaters and in 1947 a lioness, her teeth neatly filed to points, was shot in the district. In March and April a couple of dozen more people were murdered. By June the death toll of that year – despite the arrests – was 103. By then 29 of the arrested people had been sentenced to death but it was not until 1948 that the murders ceased. Since then there have been other outbreaks. In 1958, according to Bulpin (quoting Rushby), 21 lion-men victims were reported.
During the Dodoma trial a great deal of light was thrown upon lycanthropy. Some lion-men were hired out for 40 shillings a killing and were in turn ‘sub-let’ to others to cover the original costs. A woman said in evidence that her husband had been kidnapped by witchdoctors who drugged him and trained him to go about wearing a lion mask, with his body covered in baboon skins. He carried two long knives and on occasions cut meat from his victims and ate it.
The court was told how children were either kidnapped or sold to witchdoctors, who kept them in dark underground grain stores where they were unable to stand upright. They gradually developed a crouching walk and were never again capable of walking erect. All of them were driven to insanity. Their wrists were broken and their hands were tied against their forearms to simulate pads of animals. The tendons in their legs were cut to give them a particular gait. The court heard how a 15-year-old girl, kidnapped at the age of eight, was hired out as a killer at 30 shillings a time. Some of the lion-people lived on a diet of meat and lived in a lair like animals; they even copulated like animals (two were women). Almost every night they slunk out of their den in search of random victims.
Some victims might have later been consumed by real man-eaters; a five-year-old girl, snatched from her mother by a Singida lion-man, was found when only her skull, teeth and a few other parts were left. The witchdoctors – two of them women – were hanged for this particular killing, but the lion-man himself was never discovered.
I have found no record of lycanthropy after 1958 though it is possible that the occasional outbreak still occurs in remote areas of East Africa where the darker side of witchcraft occasionally manifests itself.
Solutions to the conflict between lions and humans are hard to come by. After millennia and hundreds of thousands of deaths, there still is no convincingly effective answer to man-eating lions, beyond eradicating them, as the Russians once planned to do to end the wolves–humans conflict. But to do that would surely be to emasculate Africa. Why not then eradicate elephants and hippos to alleviate crop damage? Why not wipe out all wildlife, leaving humans a free hand to plough and pave the continent? Fortunately, to go by the Ugandan survey referred to in Chapter Two, only a third of people living in lion country want that solution. Nearly a third felt people should learn how to behave in lion country.
Basic to any future strategy is to conserve the lions’ natural prey species. If ungulates are overhunted then, naturally, lions will turn to livestock and humans.
The 2009 FAO report makes the point that several countries allow for the community or individuals acting on their own to kill problem lions. The paper cites the republics of Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Senegal, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe:
In all 10 countries there is at least one law article related to the defence of human life and property from wildlife attacks; the principle, whatever category the culprit animal comes from and whether protected or non-protected; when a culprit animal is killed, the case must be reported to the wildlife authority with slight differences between countries in terms of delay to report: immediately in Niger; within three days in Cameroon; within 14 days in Zambia; and differences exist among the countries in terms of beneficiaries from the meat or trophies from the animals killed: in Cameroon and Senegal the victims benefit; in Niger and in Zambia the state does.
As far as stock losses are concerned farmers have the responsibility to protect their stock as best they can, especially at night when they are placed inside lion-proof kraals. For those who can afford it, electric fencing is very effective and such fences are necessary for communities living near the reserves. In Zululand rangers from some of the protected areas will help neighbouring communities strengthen their stockades.
It is equally important that wildlife authorities ensure that farmers who lose stock to lions or families that lose breadwinners are quickly compensated. This is being done here and there but the authorities – in Zambia for instance – claim farmers and local authorities abuse the system, and so the process of compensation is very slow and often becomes a matter of communal resentment. If anything, it might even further antagonise and incite communities to take revengeful action against lions, guilty or not.
Instances where lions break into homes are rare indeed but one wonders if this was far more common in the old days before the advent of the firearm. Some years ago I accompanied Revil Mason, professor of archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand, to the ruins of a four-centuries-old abandoned Iron Age village 150 kilometres (93 miles) west of Johannesburg. Its foundations had recently been exposed by torrential rain. In the gap where the doorway would have been in the hut’s circular foundations was a long black and shiny stone with a pronounced groove – the bottom runner of a sliding door. The huts had cavity walls at the front so that the door, during the day, could be slid back into the cavity rolling on tiny naturally-occurring ferricrete balls (ball-bearings!). At night the door would be rolled closed. Then a peg would be inserted from inside through the inner wall so that the door could not be pulled back from outside – an ancient but effective defence against man-eaters.
There are certain basic precautions that can be taken, apart from clearing the area around the village of long grass and of low bushes that might be used by lions for concealment. This is usually done as a matter of course to make it easier to spot snakes and particularly because of the threat of grass fires endangering thatched structures, yet even so I have seen Zimbabwean villages closely ringed by tall grass and scrub. Another precaution is to avoid walking alone in lion country – especially at night. When walking at night it helps to make a noise – shout and sing. But I imagine if there’s a known man-eater around this might not be advisable.
In 2009 Mozambique established militia to seek out man-eaters just as a fire brigade is quickly deployed to fight fires wherever they occur. It is too early to say whether this is proving effective. In some countries, notably Zambia, village headmen are provided with the means of dealing with such occurrences: they appoint a village marksman and the headman has to hand regular reports in to the regional authorities.
Insofar as alleviating death in the bush goes, it seems the most effective route is to create, via schools and village headmen, a sustained campaign to educate people on how to avoid becoming a casualty, just as most urbanised countries have ongoing campaigns to educate children and adults on how to use the road safely. So many villagers’ deaths in lion country are the result of a careless and often fatalistic attitude that if ever there was a ‘highway code’ for people living in lion country it should include obvious rules such as never walking home alone after dark, making lots of noise when walking after dark, never running from a lion, and, above all, avoiding reducing the lion’s natural prey.
Sport hunters believe they are part of the solution and, whatever one’s attitude is towards hunting (I am not a hunter myself), there is ample evidence that, where controlled trophy hunting is allowed on a sustainable basis, conservation scores. Paradoxically, responsible sport hunters can be the most practical of conservationists.
Organised lion hunting brings in $200 million a year into Africa according to the 2009 FAO report. Rolf D. Baldus, president of the CIC Tropical Game Commission32, said at a World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting (WFSA) congress in Nuremberg in 2011:
Wild lion populations outside national parks have a future only if rural people see a direct benefit from living with lions. Official and controlled hunting encourages the lion inhabited states to leave hunting blocks as wilderness and refrain from converting them into farmland with little biodiversity. Banning lion trophy hunting and preventing hunters taking home legally obtained trophies removes the economic as well as management and law enforcement incentives that are necessary for conservation … [in Kenya] the lion has not been legally hunted for over thirty years and during that period the lion population size has crashed to roughly about 10% of the neighbouring Tanzanian lion population, which has been hunted all along the same period.
Bans clearly do not work and actually accelerate the extinction of species33.
Baldus said all large cats that have been formally protected for decades are now even more endangered: the tiger, the snow leopard and the jaguar. He could have added the cheetah. In the 1970s there was a moratorium on hunting cheetahs and in Namibia – at the time it was the country with the most cheetahs – the population fell because sheep farmers who lost sheep to cheetahs began shooting them on sight and leaving their valueless bodies to rot in the veld. The ban was lifted and the cheetah population is now growing despite (or, rather, because of) the resumption of hunting them.
Namibia’s Minister of Environment and Tourism, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, told the 2009 WFSA forum:
Wildlife has more than tripled in recent years, as hunting tourism has encouraged landowners to have game on their land. Wildlife has turned from a cost into an asset. This has been the case on farms and ranches, but more importantly many rural communities have formed their conservancies, and the income from wildlife now contributes to their livelihoods. Game is back on land where it became extinct a long time ago. And with the ungulates the predators return. Namibia is the number one cheetah country in Africa.34