DALLAS, TX – In a year when the vocal anti-hunting minority was as loud as it was uninformed, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is going against its own proven conservation policies and those of foreign countries in an effort to appease anti hunters at home. The end result is severe crippling of lion conservation efforts in Africa.
On December 21, a USFWS press release announced the addition of two lion subspecies to the Endangered Species Act (ESA). This politicizing of wildlife conservation and oppressive restrictions on specimen importation will result in a devastating reduction of funds necessary to conserve the species in their home range, causing African lion populations to plummet.
According the USFWS statement, Panthera leo leo, located in India as well as western and central Africa, will be listed as endangered. However, Panthera leo melanochaita, with a population of more than 19,000 and growing thanks to sportsmen-funded conservation efforts, will now be listed as “threatened.” The USFWS service claims unidentified pockets of P.l. melanochaita populations, a subspecies of lion found throughout southern and eastern Afrcia, remain at risk due to “ongoing threats,” identified as “habitat loss, loss of prey base, and retaliatory killing of lions by a growing human population.” In its release, the USFWS does not list sustainable, lawful hunting as a threat to lion populations. In fact, without lawful, sustainable hunting, the threats faced by these lions will only get worse.
“The Service determined that this subspecies (P.l. melanochaita) is less vulnerable and is not currently in danger of extinction,” the USFWS statement reads. “However, although lion numbers in southern Africa are increasing overall, there are populations that are declining due to ongoing threats. As a result, the Service finds the subspecies meets the definition of a threatened species under the ESA.”
Perhaps the problem is not the people of the USFWS who are doing their jobs and enforcing the law. Maybe the problem is a flawed ESA which denies species in foreign countries classified as “endangered” or “threatened” any opportunity for help from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Sustainable Use and Livelihood Specialist Group (IUCN-SULi), the United States government or its citizens. Barring help from these groups, creatures like the African lion are doomed. Now, no one and no entity will do anything to help the remaining lions in west Africa and, in time, the last remnants of these populations will be gone. Read more
