Argued back and forth for decades (since their local extinction in 1952), the idea of reintroducing cheetah has never gone away for India. For the government, it is clearly at least partly a matter of pride – as the only home of the Asiatic lion, claiming over 50% of remaining wild tigers living within its borders, more than 10,000 wild leopards and even 4-500 wild snow leopards, cheetah was the only big cat to be allowed to go missing.
In the initial translocation 8 cheetah are being flown from Namibia to India
Even Cheetah is derived from the Hindi word Chita which means spotted one.
Yesterday, I wrote about the last lions of Nigeria. In Nigeria, there are just 2 populations of lions totalling 35-40. While this is good for the places that the lion has survived, this is highly unlikely to be able to survive long-term. With human assistance, and translocating lions regularly these populations might eventually recover.
As you can see, west African lions look very like other lions
There is one place where west African lions might stand a chance without human help and this is W-Arly-Pendjari (WAP) protected area complex that straddles Benin, Burkina Faso, and Niger and which holds 90% of West Africa’s lions. This is because all other populations are like that in Nigeria – to small to be capable of surviving longterm without human help. While the WAP complex can be lost amongst the brown on this map – if you look at the intersection of Benin Burkina Faso and Niger, you cannot miss it.
Importantly, this population is still 37% of the size of the Indian lion population. In other words, this is the last stronghold of the West African lion; the West (and central) African lion is one of the remaining relict populations of the Asiatic lion – the other one being the Indian lions of the Gir national park.
Should the Asiatic lion be renamed? It is usually referred to as the Indian lion, but with more than 1 in 4 remaining wild Asiatic lions living in Africa, this does not seem right. What is more, while over the last few decades West African lions have not done wonderfully, there is far more available habitat in West and Central Africa than there is in India, or indeed in Asia.
Perhaps more importantly, the Barbary lion, long thought extinct, appears to be the same species as the Asiatic lion and the West African lion. In other words, the Barbary lion was the genetic bridge between west Africa, and India. before its extinction, these two populations would have been permanently linked. What does this mean? Well, it is vastly simpler to move lions from one wild place to another than to train and release captive lions. If we can fortify the remaining West African lion populations, perhaps we can also allow some of these animals to be moved to other parts of the Lion range – thereby ensuring their long-term survival.
Lions have been lost from a huge area in Africa. Already extinct in 26 countries in Africa, there are perhaps as few as 15,000 lions left. Furthermore, most of these are in a small handful of reserves.
Between the Selous, Serengeti, Ruaha, Kruger and the greater Kalarhari zambezi transfrontier park are represented perhaps as high as 14,000.
This means that other reserves that still host lion tend to have very small populations with the inherent risks of inbreeding that this brings.
You will notice that on this list of lion ecosystems, none are in west Africa. This is unfortunately not a mistake. Recent analysis of the Genetics of western African lions has proved something that has been suspected for centuries. The west African lion is not the same species as the eastern and southern lion, in fact these populations are relict populations left behind as the Asiatic lion was pushed back into its home in India. In actual fact the “Asiatic lion” or “Indian Lion” once had a huge range that took in much of Europe, north Africa and Asia.
I have written about Bonobos in the past, I hope that readers are aware of this species. In brief, Bonobos (often known as Pygmy chimpanzees) are a separate great ape species. These two species split about 1 million years ago as the Congo river formed and became an impenetrable boundary between them intermixing again.
Looking very like Chimpanzees, these animals behave in a very different way
Found only in the DRC and the last of the great ape species to be discovered, Bonobos should be of great interest to humans.
Most of the historical oil and gas has been used by North America and Europe.
As a result, Europe and America have to take a large amount of blame for the current carbon dioxide crisis that is pushing global warming. While it is true that the majority of the world’s pollution will increasingly moved towards Asia, almost all of the historical emissions come from just these two continents. Having depleted many of the largest Isle and gas reserves around Europe, many European countries are not pushing into Africa. Africa is incredibly rich in oil and gas, and quite reasonably politicians in these countries argue ‘why shouldn’t we extract them and help our country grow’.
In liwonde national park, 4 species of vulture; all considered critically endangered have returned. What has prompted this? Well the reintroduction of lion and cheetah has retires some meat two be put out and this has attached the vultures.
The park is a little over 2000 square miles (5500 square km) and the cheetah population has reached 42.
One of the first cheetah to be released
Lion and cheetah were lost around 2000, and as a result the vultures left.
The problem is that was vultures are the main group cleaning up bodies, without them the bodies started and rotted. This was a perfect breeding ground for various illnesses that threaten the lives of both humans and livestock.
Farmers will often take revenge on livestock killings by poisoning the body. This usually like the lions, along with any scavengers that come along such as jackals and hennas.
However, it can have a decorating impact on vultures. Due to their way of finding near to scavenge, there can often be 20-30 vultures waiting while the lion eats – if a kill is poisened, it can kill every vulture for miles around.
Both lions and cheetah are missing from dozens of countries across Africa and Asia, places they historically roamed. While lions can cause more issues, cheetah cannot generally kill much livestock. As a result, there will be dozens of reserves where cheetah could return, allowing the reserve to start to operate more as it once did. Once this happens, tourists will start visiting and this leads to money which can help the rest of the reserves rejunivatiom. This in turn makes return of lions far easier, as assist from bringing in the funds to compensate livestock losses, it also brings in lots of money – allowing poor farmers to make more money and raise the standard of living for their family.
I wrote back in November about plans to move African cheetah from South Africa to India. Should you wish to read this original article, I have linked it below.
There has been an update. The first batch of cheetah will be moved to Kuno reserve, in August, 5-6 Cheetah will be moved to Kuno reserve in the first batch.
Kuno reserve was supposed to be the place that Asiatic lions were due to be moved to before Gujarat claimed exclusive ownership – and therefore refused to translocate the lions. The fact that cheetah are being introduced to Kuno should not rule out lions following, though Gujurat is still behaving badly on this front.
What should we make of this? Well in theory, Iranian cheetah would be far better. Unfortunately the cheetah is doing so badly, that it would be impossible to translocate cheetah to India, without risking eliminating the cheetah in Iran. African cheetah are very similar, and I would argue that a similar animal is better than none filling this ecological niche.
When you go on safari, as with other places there are animals that while fascinating you can be almost certain you will not see.
This Aardvark lives at Chester zoo
I am not talking about Black leopards, or white lions – rare genetic mutations which are therefore not always present, and when they are, there might be one or two in the whole of an ecosystem. In recent times, when a black leopard was sighted, a British photographer flew out specifically to stake out the area it was in to get his shot. He did succeed, but spent a whole trip getting the picture (Will Burrard Lucas) flew to the part of Kenya where it had been sighted, and put up camera traps which caught the creature). These are almost impossible to see, as they tend to occur very rarely. The white Lions of Timbivati are very good for this private reserve as it is almost impossible to see wild white lions anywhere else.
No, the animals that are rarely seen (and perhaps for most would not feature on a list of 100 animals they would like to see) tend to be nocturnal. I am talking of animals like the Aardvark and the pangolin. Often these species are also extremely fussy eaters, which means that not only are they incredibly hard to see in the wild, but they are incredibly hard to keep alive in captivity – increasingly zoos are starting to get these fascinating animals, as the unfounded belief that pangolin scales can treat a variety of conditions has pushed all species nearer to extinction (so it is becoming increasingly necessary to have a captive population to back up the wild one).
In the UK, the only place that you can see an Aardvark is in Colchester zoo, where they have a group of them. Knowing this, Colchester zoo is one of those that I will visit as often as I get the chance, and spend a significant amount of time by the Aardvark burrow hoping to see them awake.
Our visit last week was incredibly lucky, as the Aardvarks had to be weighed, so they all had to wake up and be moved around. I hope to put together a video after the summer, with pictures of Aardvark burrows in the wild, and the animal in captivity. If I am very lucky, I will be able to add in some wild Aardvark pictures but this is very unlikely.
We have 2 trips planned in the next few months. Later this week, I am travelling to Spain in the hope of seeing bears and wolves, and over August, my family are travelling to Kruger national park. Our aim is to film many videos during these trips, and be able to add greatly to what is listed on the channel.
The ban was to be lifted for traders to clear their stocks, and would have been lifted from the start of June to the start of December.
Outrage forced the minister in charge to reverse the change within 24 hours.
WWF the worldwide famous conservation organisation warned on Saturday that relaxing this ban would undermine progress made in wildlife protection, particularly by encouraging poaching which has been on the decline in recent years.
Hosting 50% of Africa’s lions, Tanzania is essential for the thriving of many species and so this is a good thing.
One of the main causes of these increased storms, is the fact that now the forest has been removed, there is a huge difference between the daytime temperature between the land and the sea.
This temperature gap is obviously causing winds, and so this is feeding storms.
Many lives have been lost over the last 20 year as a result of this. Unfortunately this coastal loss of forests is typical of where deforestation starts, however the climate impacts may hit us all over the next century.
