From the authors preface…
In 2005 Canadian veterinary students travelling with me in Uganda were horrified to learn that villagers in Queen Elizabeth National Park had poisoned two lions. The lions had killed a cow, and there is nothing an African pastoralist values more highly than his cattle. What the students learned first-hand was that the killing was merely that latest skirmish in one of the longest running wars on the planet—the war between wild animals and humans. As one student put it, “That’s not quite the same as the nature films we see on the TV at home.”
Two hundred years ago lions ranged over most of Africa, the only exceptions to their large territory being a belt across the two great deserts, the Sahara and the Namib, and a swath of tropical rain forest stretching from the coastal regions of what is now the Ivory Coast across through to the Congo Basin. There were also lions in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, and across much of northwestern India, almost as far east as Delhi. As with most other wild species, today their range is much reduced and dwindling. The only wild population outside Africa lives in the Gir Forest of India’s Gujurat state, where numbers are said to exceed three hundred, on a positive note up from the approximate twenty animals recorded a hundred years ago. More evidence of the former extent of lion presence, even beyond Africa and the Near East was revealed when the Chauvet cave in southeastern France was discovered in 1994. The cave is adorned with more stunning lion images than all other European art caves combined. It has been dated back about 35,000 years.
…The symbolic significance of lions is pervasive. Indeed it is difficult to travel anywhere and not see the evidence of lions affecting the human imagination. The lion occurs everywhere in heraldry, notably for me perhaps as a Glasgow graduate, on Scotland’s flag. Lions have been the subjects of countless works of art—paintings and statues, tapestries and so on—from those giants in Trafalgar square “guarding” Nelson to the New York Public Library Lions that sit at the library’s entrance, from lions in Buddhist temples to those in ancient Egyptian works. Among the strangest image I have encountered involving lions is the chimera figure, a naked woman’s body with lion’s feet topped by a lion’s head, which can be seen set into each of the gateposts of the children’s garden in Mongolia’s capital city Ulaanbaatar.
…The first challenge for the Greek hero Heracles (Hercules to the Romans) was to slay the impossibly fierce and powerful Nemean lion, a competition immortalized (lionized?) by artists from the classical, Renaissance and Baroque eras, including works by Andrea Mantegna and Peter Paul Rubens and on statues, ancient Greek vases and amphoras, mosaics and Egyptian papyri. [you reversed the order suggested by Brigid, in which she used these examples chronologically – ie. ancient Greek vases and amphoras, Egyptian papyri, numerous mosaics and mosaics and artists from the classical, Renaissance and Baroque eras, including works by Andrea Mantegna and Peter Paul Rubens. As Heracles won, and wore the animal’s hide as a cloak of immense power, it is small wonder then that so many of today’s sports teams have the creature as a part of their name. They come particularly from most codes of football: rugby, the British Lions; soccer, the emblem of the English Premier League and the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon; Canadian football, the British Columbia Lions; and, in the American football code, the Detroit Lions and the Nittany Lions of Pennsylvania State University.
…From a twenty-first century perspective, the use of lions in Roman circuses can hardly be believed. In many Roman circuses, at least one hundred lions were slaughtered per single event. The zenith (or nadir) of such slaughter was probably the massacre of six hundred lions in 55BCE in the games organized by General Pompey. No wonder lions vanished from their former ranges in North Africa and on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. The reason for such slaughter could no doubt be attributed to both iconic and entertainment elements, as maned lions—the males—were much preferred in these shows. Perhaps the blood lust of the spectators and organizers of such events was a mere variation of that seen around the rings of the bull, dog and cock fighting shows that still occur today.
…When I was planning the structure of this book, it seemed to me that the lion is also symbolic of the entire gamut of wildlife species, not only in Africa, but worldwide. The Trouble With Lions might also read The Trouble With Rhinos, or Marmosets, or possibly even the improbably named Dromedary Jumping Slug (threatened in Canada’s British Columbia), not to mention the names of a host of other species. Of course a title such as The Trouble with Jumping Slugs or Codfish might not catch the potential reader’s eye in quite the same way, and it would certainly not have excited a publisher. The type of trouble may differ between each of these species and humans, but it is undoubtedly there.
…These days lions are principally considered trouble as livestock predators; but they are also in trouble, not only from humans defending their stock but also from massive declines in numbers of prey species and from newly emerged diseases. There are glimmers of hope that the trouble may not lead to the disappearance of the species in some areas, but overall numbers are way down and still declining.
…A major theme of these accounts is the complicated relationship that exists between people, their livestock, and the wildlife around them. In many ways this matrix defines the past, present and future of wildlife issues in Africa.
In this book I tell stories of working with wild animals and people over a forty-year span in Africa, from South Africa to Cameroon, and from early days in Kenya to recent activities in Uganda. All the stories are linked to my work as a wildlife vet and my fascination with the animal world.