Tread Lightly on the Earth
JV
Craig Packer: ‘Cecil the lion’s killer
was unlucky and not altogether to blame’
The ecologist and author has spent 30
years researching the overhunting of lions in Africa and is
deeply pessimistic about their future. Here he talks about
dishonest hunting operators, the urgent need for global
money, why he takes issue with animal groups – and what
we’ve learned from Cecil
Sunday 4 October 2015 07.59 BST
Craig Packer likes sticking his shaggy
academic head into dangerous places. He’s had death threats,
confronted megalomaniac politicians, been run out of
countries and mugged. But the man who has spent 30 years
trying to study and save lions came close to real fear last
month.
As the world’s media worked themselves
into a tizz over the American dentist who paid $50,000 to
shoot Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe, Packer happened to have
severe toothache, which forced him to seek treatment in
Minneapolis, where he directs the Lion Research Centre at
the university.
“And what do you do?” asked the dentist,
drill in hand.
There was an uncomfortable pause, Packer
says. “Suddenly I felt very vulnerable. This is a class of
people who can cause significant pain…”
Packer got out alive, just as he did when
invited to meet Steven Chancellor, the billionaire lion
hunter and leading donor to the Bush 2004 presidential
campaign. He had been seeking better regulation of trophy
hunting in Tanzania and got a tour of the big game hunter’s
mansion. One room had two large elephants, 10 leopards, six
hyenas, and 15 dead lions.
The tableau of death was chilling, he
writes in his new book. “The lions are all busy… At least
three pairs are working together to pull down various prey
while a larger group is stalking an eland. It is like a
workout room at a gym, but nothing moves… At the end of the
tour I have seen at least 50 lions.”
“As you can see, I have a special love of
lions,” Chancellor told him.
Packer bit his lip and left. “I was numb.
When I see an animal, I want to know what it’s about to do
next. They lead the most interesting lives. But no matter
how lifelike Chancellor’s stuffed animals, they were all
frozen in death. They had all been reduced to mere
reflections of him.”
After 30 years researching the
overhunting of lions in Africa, Packer is profoundly
pessimistic about their future. The figures are stark. The
global population has dropped to under 30,000 from 100,000
in the 1980s; there are fewer than 2,000 left in Kenya, only
2,800 wild lions in South Africa, and numbers have declined
66% in 15 years in Tanzania. Yet hunters are invited to kill
thousands every year and vast tracts are reserved for
hunting.
Their long-term survival, he says,
depends on big money coming in to protect them. But
counterintuitively, he says, trophy hunters like Chancellor
or the dentist are also needed.
“Trophy hunting is not inherently
damaging to lion populations, provided the hunters take care
to let the males mature and wait to harvest them after their
cubs are safely reared. The dentist was unlucky and not
altogether to blame.
“Trophy hunters are no angels but they
actually control four times as much lion habitat in Africa
than is protected in national parks; and 80% of the world’s
lions left in the world are in the hunters’ hands.”
“Clients like the dentist are just
tourists. They believe whatever they are told. It’s
extremely unlikely that [the dentist] knew anything about
that particular lion or even how close he was to the
national park when he shot it. It’s common practice in
Zimbabwe for hunting operators to draw lions out of the
parks so their clients can shoot them.”
However much he scorns the city slickers
who spray bullets at anything with fangs, he insists he is
not waging war on controlled hunting.
The problem is the companies are under
extreme pressure to provide big male lions for their
clients, and the industry is sleazy and corrupt. Some
professional hunters engage in double hunting, where they
let their clients exceed the quota of lions they can kill
and then bury the less impressive lion; others will shoot a
buffalo before the client arrives to bait a site to attract
a lion so it can be easily shot on day one.
“If you are well connected you don’t even
have to pay the government. Professional hunters are mostly
working-class kids from South Africa, white Kenyans, French,
Brits. These guys are pros but there is no oversight or
accountability.
“The corrupt companies all have
connection with government. They are ruthless. The good ones
fear that they will not be able to carry on if I name them.
Hunting in Tanzania has been a bad thing. Kenya is just as
bad.”
The hunting industry argues that its
money goes to conservation, but Packer rejects this.
“Hunters lie and the industry greatly exaggerates its
‘positive’ impact on wildlife conservation,” he says. “A lot
of clients head off into the bush believing that their
$50,000 will save the world – when in fact virtually none of
that money goes to conservation and the true costs of
conservation are far higher. [With Cecil] the hunters paid a
small fine to the Zimbabwean government, while the dentist
became the international scapegoat.“[Yet] hunting could well
provide the best possible incentive for conserving vast
tracks of land. Lions occupy the top of the pyramid. If
hunters take care of entire ecosystems – the land, the
plants and the herbivores – they would be rewarded with
healthy numbers of lions.
“I get hunting. It’s done a lot for
conservation in North America. Done well, it’s good for
preserving wildlife and can be a valuable wildlife
management tool. I grew up in Texas. I used to shoot ducks,
rabbits, birds for the pot.”
Packer – who first went to Tanzania to
study baboons with [British primatologist] Jane Goodall, and
whose field research on lion manes, the colouring of noses
and overhunting has provided countries with the science to
regulate lion conservation – has come to identify with the
animals he researches.
“Lions sit around doing nothing for long
periods of time, then they get up and do the most amazing
things, like catch a buffalo or chase off their neighbours.
This seems like a life well-lived. I endure long periods of
teaching, writing grants, dealing with bureaucrats, then
I’ve had the good fortune to experience the most amazing
things.
“And like lions, I have my own social
group, and the greatest rewards have come from working with
family and my research team. The secret of lion society is
mutual respect – there’s no real dominance hierarchy between
the females or within most male coalitions – which seems the
best way to collaborate with the people in my life.”
The hunters may be liars, but he has
little truck either with the religious fervour and
sentimentality of the animal lovers. “Animal groups tend to
[seem] religious. It feels like a theology. I get into
conflict with everyone. I like fences. Animal lovers hate
fences. I tell hunters, ‘you guys lie’. There are two sides
to every argument and both sides are right on certain
points.”
The Cecil episode was instructive
because, as a scientist, he finds the whole idea of naming
lions bizarre. “There are lots of Cecils out there. Just
last week one of my students reported a spearing of a lion
by a Maasai. It had no name. Normally lions are called
things like MH3T or lion LGB.
“The Cecil story tells me that we as a
species can only show empathy with individual organisms. The
question is how do you fire up the same concerns for
populations? It’s frustrating.
“But Cecil did fire people up. It brought
awareness and raised issues like should lions be on the
endangered species list or should the EU ban trophies from
certain African countries?”
Cecil also helped open doors for Packer
to lobby the US and EU for control of trophy imports. “Since
Cecil, I have had auditions with local congresswomen.
Frankly, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has been blase
about lions. They have downplayed the damage that lion
hunting inflicts. I have also asked the EU to take into
account that Tanzania is corrupt and they should consider
banning all trophies from there.”
The root causes for the cataclysmic
decline of wildlife in Africa, he says, are funding and
population pressure. “Wildlife just does not have enough
value. Cecil should not have been shot for $50,000. They
should have charged $1m. Trophy hunting only provides a very
small fraction of the money for conservation.”
He favours the South African system of
conservation, with wildlife effectively kept behind fences
and strict regulation and demarcation of land. It may feel
controlled and overmanaged, but it works, he says – and
people do not get killed.
“People are not going to magically stop
killing lions. You can’t expect communities to accept lots
of people being killed each year by lions.”
The wider solution, he says, is for the
world to recognise that the great African wildlife reserves
are true world heritage sites and that their protection
should be paid out of global funds.
Cecil the lion: case against hunt leader
should be thrown out, court told
Lawyers for Theo Bronkhorst argue
circumstances surrounding death of famous 13-year-old big
cat do not constitute a chargeable offence
“They are world treasures yet Unesco
gives no money – there’s no revenue at all. Photo tourism is
not enough. If you go to Yosemite you will be charged a
nominal entry fee. That does not cover costs, but you’re
paying for Yosemite with your taxes. The west has the tax
base to cover the costs but Africa has the poorest people
and no revenue.
“We cannot expect wildlife to pay its
way. I am now goading people to engage organisations like
Unesco and the World Bank to recognise that if we are to
keep the [wildlife], the global community must pay for them.
That is my crusade. A lot of people have been duped into
thinking that just by being a tourist or a hunter, it is
enough. It’s not.
“If the giga-bucks do not come, then
there is no hope. I have resigned myself to the fact that in
50 years, the only places in Africa that will be worth going
to [for wildlife] will be Botswana, Namibia and South
Africa. All the rest will be gone.”
