Spend a couple of hours watching some incredible footage of (African) lions, their social structures and habits.
OK, young males get driven out and either live alone of suck it up and drive another male from its pride and become Alpha Male.
No problem - lions are required to be big and tough or the buffalo would kill them.
But: a recurring theme in these stories is the tiny cub/kit which injures a paw and cannot keep up with the pride as it move to follow prey. Invariably, the voice will do a “unable to maintain the constant pace of the pride, the mother gives the cub up and moves on with the pride. The outlook for the cub is bleak”. Next shot, the cub is dead and the intonation is “without its mother, the cub succumbs quickly”.
A varient is the young driven away (this is sometimes ALL sub-adults of the old male - including females).
We then track this group as it tries to eke out a living away from the water source and without encroaching on another pride’s territory.
In one of last night’s tales, the entire adolescent group was driven out -1 or 2 males and enough females to come up with 11. We then have brief glimpses of the male (didn’t do well). As the action returns to the pride, we are told "it is a tough life - of the 11 driven off, only 3 survived to adulthood.
What the F!? Mom doesn’t want the cub with a dinged paw? There are zoos which would love to fix it and put it in their captive breeding program. Worried about taking a food source? I’ll buy you a damned chihuahua. Got a bunch of starving 'teenagers" - for them to come across a dead buffalo just might be arranged - the presence of a bullet hole will probably not be noticed. They ate a 5-day old carcass just fine.
So why is the obvious not done? Can’t care for a cub ANE continue shooting? A chopper is probably within range. Remote-controlled drones have been around for over 70 years.
Why has this not been done?
Extreme lengths were used to save the California Condor. The people doing the filming have some large, well-funded institution behind them.
The special survival strategy of mammals (and many birds) is that the parent has a relatively small number of children, but then invests a great amount of resources in raising and protecting and teaching those children (compared to, say, oysters).
Very young children, however, are cheap since the parent has not yet invested much in them. Adults are much more important, having a lot of resource invested in them by the time they grow up. So it’s more important to protect and maintain the adults than the babies. And more babies can always be made.
I learned this in an introductory anthropology class I took some years ago. The point being made was that humans (at least modern first-world-thinking ones) have abandoned this strategy, choosing instead to put near-unlimited resources into protecting the very young children, even though they don’t yet represent much investment. In anthropological terms, this is seen as an aberration.
ETA: The specific example given in class (or maybe in E. O. Wilson’s books, I forget where I saw it) is that contrary to popular belief, lion cubs don’t get to eat first. When lions take down a gazelle, the adults crowd around and pig out. When they are full to the gills and wander off, then the cubs get to gnaw at whatever pickings remain.
Lionsare not critically endangered, and the degree to which they are endangered has everything to do with available habitat; they breed very well, and if new viable habitats opened up, they’d fill those niches very quickly.
I used to camp at Assateague, where a wild horse herd lived. The park rangers had a strict nonintervention policy wrt the herd. Occasionally a young foal would get separated from the herd. Although the foal could easily be steered back, it just wasn’t done, often to the dismay of campers.
Are you suggesting the film-makers intervene by providing a stunt-carcass? Let’s say people start doing such things in the wild to our favored species (the ones we find aesthetically pleasing only) like the lions. Their population grows, and new prides cannot compete with existing prides for territory, so they take over areas close to humans, and a few locals are killed and eaten. Are the film-makers responsible? But hey, there are so many people around these days, we can afford to loose a few of them to the lions, because hey, the baby lions are cute as hell, right?
Human intervention with endangered species can have spectacular results (see California Sea Lion) with sometimes unintended consequences. While I agree the natural balance of things is already far out of whack because of human activity and numbers, I just cannot see that the film-makers should do anything other than observe.
IMO, yes, the OP is entirely about wanting the human camera crew to intervene, and has nothing to do with decrying Nature in its naturally indifferent course.
As to the OP’s (IMO mistaken) notion:
All of journalism has the ethical dilemma of when to report and when to intervene. Every camera shot you have ever seen of disaster recovery or a post-accident scenario could have had one more pair of hands working to help instead of taking pictures.
A long time ago the industry decided that reporting itself served a greater good. Having the rest of us see the footage or know about the event will produce more good in the long run than foregoing the pictures for an extra pair of helping hands at the moment.
To be sure there are limits. And many times reporting crews do abandon reporting at least briefly to help. Of which we don’t get footage, only later written reports.
So much for generalities. Turning to the specifics of the OP’s lion show. …
The idea that it makes sense for the human camera crew to dispatch a helicopter to rescue a lion cub is childish in the extreme. It does however show how well the dramatically overwrought heart-tugging narrative of the *cwute widdle wion cubbies *is working on the cynically chosen intended target audience. Don’t forget to send in your donations to whatever critically under-funded support group is advertised at the break.
Which ones? African lions breed very well in captivity, to such an extent that there is often a surplus. Some zoos have euthanized lions when they have too many of them. It is very unlikely that a zoo is going to want an injured lion cub taken from the wild.
Explain exactly why the lion’s life is more important than the buffalo’s?
Mainly because it’s utterly absurd. Choppers are not necessarily in range in areas where lions live in Africa, and it any case it would be ridiculously expensive to call in a chopper for a single injured cub for a species that is not critically endangered. And I have no idea how you think a drone might be used to save a cub.
The California Condor was critically endangered, with a population of only 22 in the wild in 1987. Extreme measures were necessary to prevent its extinction. While lions are decreasing in the wild, they are not threatened with immediate extinction, and there are tens of thousands of them in Africa and many more in captivity. Saving a single injured cub would have no appreciable affect on lion conservation.
I live in an apartment complex by a creek, which currently has several clutches of ducklings of various ages. Last year, one duckling had a perceptible limp, and some of the kids who run around here asked me if anyone was going to take it to a veterinarian. I replied that it was a wild animal, and if it was supposed to get better, it would.
I’ve had both. There was a restaurant specializing in exotic game in Vegas when I lived there back in the 80s.
Neither have much to recommend them over more traditional fare. Not bad, just nothing as exotic-tasting as the name would lead you to hope.
Although in my younger more swaggering days I used to like to trot out my aphorism: “In this life there are two kinds of people: Lion-Eaters, and … non-lion-eaters.” With the embedded uppercasing carefully pronounced.
I haven’t thought of that saying or that joint in years. Thanks.
The critical danger for lions as a species is loss of habitat. Big cats are prolific breeders in both the wild and in captivity. Every few months you hear about a guy with a lion or tiger in a cage in his backyard, but there are no zoos or shelters to take the animal, because every zoo with space for big cats has that space filled to capacity. Zoos can’t take in more big cats, if you call your local zoo asking them to take your backyard lion they’ll just laugh at you.
Yes, it’s hard to see a cute baby lion cub in trouble. It’s also hard to see a cute impala calf in trouble. How many zebras and antelope is that lion going to kill in its lifetime? Do we save the lion by killing a zebra for it to eat, or do we save the zebra by killing the lion that wants to eat it?
I did a quick look at known lion territories in Africa - light pink = possible medium red = probable/low density dark red = high density.
There was a whole lot more pink than dark red - and the areas of dark red were generally very small a fire or flood could make a mess.
A buffalo will get the same import when there are not herds of millions.
Yes, the sanctimony of “we’re Journalists - we don’t get our hands dirty”. So let one of the hired hands call in the position.
You want the cubs to die because they’re cheap? Ho about the “teens” - they have invested between 2 and 3 years in these (life expectancy is 10-14 in the wild, sexual maturity is around age 4).
And before we let this go - one of the story had two brothers driven out and just happened to find a female from a nearby pride out on her own. How did she get away from the pride and into the path of the wandering brothers? She had a collar. Not everyone in the party was above intervening.
How about elephants? Are thhey rare enough to call in a chopper when a mother dies and the herd rejects the orphan?
How many if a species needs to be left before we pick up the DNA sitting there?
Did you read the responses in the thread? The answer in reference to lions is “fewer than we have now.” Saving Charismatic megafauna is a good PR tactic, but saving all of them is not necessarily the right approach to all problems.
The DNA just sitting there isn’t, by itself, very valuable.
The way to save lions is to ignore the injured, ill, whatever individuals and instead work on preventing their habitats’ destruction. Any other approach is feel-good nonsense which is worse than useless because it gives the illusion of helping when, by diverting action away from what will actually help, it’s actually harming the lions.
The situation is similar for whichever other critter(s) we care to discuss.
A basic rule for all issues of ecology or human interaction with nature: If you’re doing something heart-warming, you’re doing it wrong.
Yes, lions are decreasing, but in conservation terms they are considered “Vulnerable,” not Critically Endangered.
There aren’t “herds of millions” of African buffalo; the total world population is less than a million.
Have you been reading anything that’s been said? Do you have any idea what wildlife photographers have to do to get their footage? (I do, because I know some.) If they didn’t intervene with the cub it wasn’t because they didn’t want to get dirty.
No one has said they want the cubs to die. People have tried to explain to you about animal demographics in the wild, but you seem not to get the point.
This makes no sense. Was this a radio collar? If so, there would have been no reason for the researchers to have directed the animal’s movements, since they were undoubtedly studying natural behavior.
No. That would be even more ridiculous than doing it for a lion cub. There are about 600,000 of them in Africa. Like African Lions, they are considered Vulnerable but not Critically Endangered.
I have worked as a conservation biologist in New Zealand with some extremely rare birds like the Kakapo. This has included some work by helicopter. As a practical matter, before you start considering something as expensive as helicopter work, a species is going to be down to something less than 1,000 individuals and probably fewer than 100. And there are a lot of extremely threatened species with small populations in developing countries with no conservation programs at all.
