So it seems the world is still reeling about the tale of a lion being poached by a rich white trophy hunter. Zimbabwe mourned a whole week before they reopened hunting. They also decided that it was not the dentist's fault for paying the permits in good faith and decided to not press charges. The camp seems to be widely divided on where their outrage lies - one group points to trophy hunting and screams of it's evils. Another points to the killing of a lion and says killing is evil as a lion somehow holds more value it seems than other animals or even poor people. To the mob slathering I simply say "the world is a complicated place" and nothing good comes of knee jerk judgement and a call to harm this man and his family.
A lion - even one with a cute name is not a pet. It is a wild animal with all the needs of food, water, and space. If you want to pretend to care about lions the last of these things - space is the greatest threat to their continued existence. The lion population is plummeting because of deliberate poison by encroaching civilization and fragmentation caused by the ever extending plague of impoverished humanity that needs to turn resources into prosperity in whatever way they can.
You cannot hope to save lions without saving people. People who don't have to worry about being eaten or attacked by lions are far more likely to accept lions being part of their world and be less apt to poison them for the slightest trespass against them. This is a very expensive proposition to raise a people out of poverty without stripping the environment of it's resources. Americans couldn't do it. We drove the great predators to our boarders and stripped land of trees and minerals poisoning the water. It takes time to recover from that and only now have the grizzly bears, wolverines, and wolves began to expand into once held grounds and beyond through strict regulations on sustainable albeit controversial hunting.
There has to be a local reason to care, for lions to be saved. Right now the people of African nations have made it clear that where lions are without monetary value that there will be no lions.
So what in the crunch of time are a people to do?
One solution is to ban hunting. Sadly legal sport hunting often takes the brunt of environmental activism because it's the easiest and cheapest fruit to pick. Sadly making an animal worthless rather than worth something is a pretty poor way to incentivize a person to want to keep that pesky critter around. One environmental solution is to make lions and other wildlife valuable... crazy valuable. Regulate the gills out of it and use the money generated to protect more wildlife and enrich the lives of the people who live near them.
The other is to acknowledge that you have to not preach values without considering the lives of the people who would have to live them. The only species that seems to be able to rebound without hunting to raise their value are species where we don't compete for resources and space with - such as with the whaling ban which has to this point encouraged the recovery of baleen whales like the grey whale but seems to have been not as kind to the orca who still seems to struggle with depleted fish stocks and the amount of heavy metal waste that poisons them.
