Ten lions have been killed with poison in an attack on the wildlife in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation area. It is yet another incident where human factors outweigh the survival of the animals we share the planet with.
Apparently the local nomadic human population in the area has increased by a factor of about ten since about 1960. The government has seen this rightly as a risk to the wild animals being conserved in the region, and has attempted to relocate the human population in recent years. The exact source of the poisoning of the lions is not currently known, but it follows from friction in the area that the nomads are likely at fault for the deaths.
I am certain that the nomadic people of Ngorongoro have strong arguments for their actions. But from my comfortable place thousands of kilometres distant I am left with very little patience to hear the rationale. There are only a few tens of thousand lions left in the wild globally, and over 8 billion humans. It is beyond time that we start taking better care to cause less harm instead of more. Hopefully the killing of lions in Ngorongoro stops here.
