Fences may be best route to saving lions

Published 5:00 am Thursday, March 28, 2013

Some scientists and conservationists believe that fencing lions off from people and livestock is the best way to protect them.

After 35 years of field research in the Serengeti plains, Craig Packer, director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota, has lost all patience with the romance of African wilderness. Fences, he says, are the only way to stop the precipitous decline in the number of African lions.

“Reality has to intrude,” he said. “Do you want to know the two most hated species in Africa, by a mile? Elephants and lions.”

They destroy crops and livestock, he said, and sometimes, in the case of lions, actually eat people.

Packer’s goal is to save lions. Fencing them in, away from people and livestock, is the best way to do that, he believes, both for conservation and economics. He made that argument in a paper this month in Ecology Letters, along with 57 co-authors, including most of the top lion scientists and conservationists.

The paper lays out the value of fences in clear terms, although it stops short of endorsing fencing as the only sensible option. That is Packer’s own view. He says open and free co-existence with lions is not practical, nor is it fair to the humans who have to live with the big cats.

Not all the authors see fencing as the only solution. Co-author Luke Hunter, the president of Panthera, a conservation organization devoted to big cats, said, “it’s clear that fencing does help lion conservation.” And, he said, people outside of Africa underestimate the difficulties posed by lions, which, he said, are “really, really difficult to live with if you’re a subsistence human population that depends on livestock.”

But, Hunter said, the authors had not been able to evaluate the effectiveness of the various efforts to resolve conflicts between lions and people, including livestock management and other issues, because there had simply not been enough of them. Also, he said, “there are still huge parts of wilderness in Africa,” where conflicts between humans and lions are not yet a problem.

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