WORLD LION DAY - AUGUST 10, 2016

August 10 is World Lion Day! 

Here are two things you can do to help protect this incredible big cat:

1) Take the ‪#‎LetLionsLive pledge at letlionslive.org—if you've already taken the pledge, encourage your friends and family to take it too.

2) Help spread the word! Download our Facebook cover image and photo facts here (https://www.panthera.org/2016-world-lion-day) and post them tomorrow with the #LetLionsLive and ‪#‎WorldLionDay hashtag.

Here are some of our recent lion posts.  In case you missed them.

What have we done?  And, why do we continue to do it?

A little over a century ago there were perhaps a million lions in Africa.

By the 1940s that number had dropped to about 450 000, and today there are fewer than 20 000.

It’s a sorry tale of annihilation by man.

I can find no statistic giving a reliable, or even unreliable, figure on the number of lions in the wild in South Africa today, but there are apparently about 1 000 captive bred lions lined up to be shot as trophies (known as canned lion hunting).

Apart from trophy hunting, lion bones are being sold to far eastern countries for use in traditional Asian medicine.

Bred for the Bullet

Trophy hunting may be financially important to some African conservancies, but Blood Lions in not about trophy hunting, it is about trophy murder of captive bred lions.  Bred to be shot down for the pleasure of “hunters”.

Durban - Growing numbers of tourism operators, including Tourvest and Thompsons, are throwing their weight behind a Born to Live Wild campaign that discourages tourists from visiting facilities where direct engagement with captive predators is permitted.

The campaign is an offshoot of the Blood Lions documentary which premiered at the 2015 Durban International Film Festival, before hitting the worldwide big screen circuit.

The documentary blew the lid on how vague legislation in South Africa had allowed the practice of “canned lion hunting” to morph into a murky, multimillion-rand industry also involving “cub petting” and “walking with lions”.

The worldwide campaign against lions being bred for the bullet has now reached more than 11 million people with a weekly Facebook audience of 60 000, said Blood Lions marketing manager, Lauren van Niekerk.

Van Niekerk said a Blood Lions delegation would attend the next Cites CoP17 Conference being held in Johannesburg in September. A youth awareness drive will also see Blood Lions screened at more schools and universities countrywide, and its offshoot, Born to Live Wild, has been endorsed by more than 85 tourism operators and partners in southern Africa and abroad.

Urban Mountain Lions

It’s a tough life for urban lions, but somehow they manage to co-exist with humans in heavily populated urban environments.

The National Park Service did the entire nation a huge favor this week, releasing several photos of the seriously, ridiculously cute mountain lion kittens born recently in California’s Santa Susana Mountains.

Park officials discovered the first litter of kittens, which includes three females, on June 8, according to LAist. They discovered the second den, housing two male and one female kittens, on June 22. Researchers are tracking 14 mountain lions in the region and studying the obstacles they face in the area around Los Angeles.

“The real challenge comes as these kittens grow older and disperse, especially the males, and have to deal with threats from other mountain lions and also road mortality and the possibility of poisoning from anticoagulant rodenticide,” biologist Jeff Sikich told the LA Times.

Freeways present one of the biggest threats to the felines as they get older, Sikich told LAist. When cubs are old enough to leave their mother, finding territory to call their own often means they’re forced to try and cross the busy roads that cut through their habitat ― and the result can be deadly for the mountain lions.

Tweets Don’t Save Lions

Excellent framing of the real threats facing lions in Africa.  Hint – it isn’t Minnesota dentists.

THE killing of Zimbabwe’s celebrated Cecil the Lion by a Minnesota dentist, on July 1 of last year unleashed a storm of moral fulmination against trophy hunting. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals issued an official statement calling for the hunter, Walter J. Palmer, to be hanged, and an odd bedfellow, Newt Gingrich, tweeted that Dr. Palmer and the entire team involved in the killing of Cecil should go to jail. The television personality Sharon Osbourne thought merely losing “his home, his practice and his money” would do, adding, “He has already lost his soul.”

Unfortunately, the furor did almost nothing to slow the catastrophic decline in lion populations, down 43 percent over the past two decades. That’s because trophy hunting was never really the main problem. Lions are disappearing in Africa for a reason far more complicated and less susceptible to either moral grandstanding or easy solutions: Impoverished Africans are eating the lions’ prey and killing the lions themselves — at a rate estimated at five to 10 times the take from trophy hunting.

As a result, lions are now effectively extinct across much of West and Central Africa; two populations, totaling about 400, remain. Continentwide, only about 20,000 lions survive, according to a new report, “Beyond Cecil: Africa’s Lions in Crisis,” just issued by Panthera and another conservation group, WildAid. That’s down from 200,000 in the mid-20th century, and populations are likely to drop by half, except in southern Africa, over the next two decades.

The 33

The journey was long and complex, but the 33 circus lions rescued from South America, have arrived at Emoya Big Cat Sanctuary in South Africa.

From years living in circus cages to this, it's their first taste of freedom, the first time they feel grass, the first time they rub against a tree, and the first time they roar purely for pleasure and not to entertain.

Yes, this is a feel good story and there will be segments of the conservation community who will question the cost of saving this group of lions versus dedicating the money to long term sustainability projects. Their arguments will be well reasoned and based on practical cost/benefit equations. But, those arguments and equations will miss the point. This group of 33 has garnered extensive publicity and their adventure has widely disseminated information regarding the plight of lions in the wild and captive lions being used for public entertainment. How do you quantify the impact of the 33 on the public consciousness?

These lions will never be free in the sense that their wild relatives live free. But, they will live in freedom from abuse and cruelty. They won’t live in cages and be prodded into performing or beaten into submission for failing to do so.

The lions will never be able to catch their own game, as many have fractured teeth and missing claws. But these brave old warriors will at least live out the rest of the natural lives in the land that should have been their home.

At Just Save One, we believe that the 33 will not only live out their lives in safety, free from want and abuse, but their story will inspire people to do what they can to help save the lions of the world.

You can help the 33 here.

Or, you can volunteer your time at Emoya. I highly recommend a trip to South Africa.