A Lion's False Teeth

Last week I received a copy of an email sent to the Saskatoon Zoo Society, of which I was a member for many years in the 70s and 80s. A 14 year-old boy in Winnipeg explained how he has been told stories by his grandad about a lion. As Zachary wrote it “He used to be a professor of dentistry at the University of Saskatchewan during the 70’s and 80’s. He always used to tell me how you came to him seeking his help to make the world’s first set of dentures for a lion.

That was not quite how I recalled the case, but I have the advantage of a set of photos taken that day and a short article I wrote for the Journal of Zoo Animal Medicine (as it was in those days).

George (the lion) lived in a small enclosure at the Forestry Farm Zoo in Saskatoon. When I arrived in the city from Kenya in 1975 there had not been any sort of veterinary program there and no animals had ever been vaccinated for anything. This is only relevant to George the lion’s situation because he hated me with a passion. After only one injection, given when a keeper fed him some meaty tidbits through the page wire fence, he would not let me near him. He recognized me at a distance, even when I tried to disguise myself. On one occasion he even picked me out in a crowd when I took my family to the zoo and carried my then two-year-old son on my shoulders. He must surely have recognized my face, as my gait and shape would have been markedly altered that day.

So, when the keepers told me that George was off his feed, and had only been toying with the fresh chunks of meat and bone that he had been tempted with over the last couple of days, I knew we had to take action. With some planning we tricked the old lion. I went over to this pen, so of course he promptly headed to the other side, as far away from me as possible. Little did he know it but he was now in range for Stu, one of the team, to use my blowgun and get a drug cocktail into him.

Within a few minutes he was out cold so we could think about entering his pen, but not before checking that Queenie, the lioness with which he spent his days, was safely locked in the shelter. That part was simple, but we still took it very carefully. The first step was to bounce a rock of his backside. No reaction. On closer approach we could poke a long stick at his side. Still no reaction. 

Essential eye protection

 I checked his heart and breathing and then had a look at his mouth. 

Sore mouth, broken teeth. No wonder he was off his feed.

It was easy to see what the problem was. He had three broken canine teeth, the big ones that a lion uses to kill his prey. Two of them had nasty-looking pus-like material oozing out. No wonder he was of his feed. He must have been hurting.

I at once knew that I need some help with this one. By lunchtime I was back in my office at the WesternCollege of Veterinary Medicine and I had had an excited response after my call to the dental college across campus. Two mornings later we were back at the zoo. By we, I mean me and three dentists. This is almost certainly two more dentists than were actually needed, but it is not every day that a chance like this would arise. Indeed one of them has been telling his grandson about the case some thirty-five years later.

Immobilization was much easier this time because the keeper staff had shut Queenie out of the shelter and George was within easy reach for his injection. The dental team soon had a cast made of George’s mouth and promised to get everything done as soon as possible. They began to discuss idea for making up a set of metal crowns. 

A wild lion with a broken tooth, in this case an incisor

We discussed the whys and wherefores of how George had broken his teeth. I had seen broken teeth in wild lions, and had learned that this was sometimes caused by biting at a hard bone, but it is a rare event. In George’s case it was almost certainly due to his biting at the wires around his cage and catching the rear, concave surfaces of his teeth. When he pulled back they got stuck and could break off. Apparently this was a recognized hazard for lions in captivity. 

Our third immobilization, for a much longer procedure, took place a few days later. Again, George was easy to approach in his shelter and the routines were simple.  

Out of the pen, off to the trailer

I checked his heart and breathing, and pretty soon we were carrying him to a waiting flatbed trailer where I administered some eye drops to protect his corneas and we put a towel over his head. From there we shifted a very sleepy lion into the zoo van and headed to the college. Once there another team joined us—the anesthesia team. These were the folks who would have to keep both George and all the people safe for a couple of hours. We did not exactly want him waking up mid-surgery!

Pipe cleaners do have other uses!

At this point I was more-or-less supernumerary. The dentists took over for the root canal procedure, for that is what was needed. Not just on one tooth, but on three. They had come fully prepared. None of their usual delicate instruments was going to be of much use. To clean out the infected tooth roots they used coping saw blades that they had picked up at a hardware store. Flushing the mess out of the root canals was easier. Instead of their normal fine equipment they used large veterinary needles, there was no shortage of those around. To dry everything up they had sterilized a whole bunch of pipe cleaners.

The brand new caps in place on the casts. Perfect fit!

Now came the really clever bit. The dentists had designed stainless steel tooth caps that had no concave surfaces. If George got at the wires again the teeth would simply slip off as he pulled.

With the canals and teeth dry and clean it was simply a case of applying the right sort of cement, albeit in much large quantities than any previous human patient, inserting the pins into the channels and letting everything dry.

Ready to roll! No chewing problems now.

George soon adapted to his new finery. His appetite returned, and he lived on for quite a few more trouble-free years. There was a brief interlude of an idea to rename him Jaws, after the nasty guy played by Richard Dawson Kiel in the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. That did not last.

A display item at the WCVM

George’s skull, with teeth in place, is now a part of the collection of bones and other bits in the WCVM’s anatomy department. The unusual skull appears every now and again on special display days. They were never strictly dentures, as Zachary has been told, but at the time they were indeed the world’s only set of capped lion’s teeth.

A favourite photo from the Serengeti. I did not chekc the teeth too closely, but they looked fine

The Lions Livestock Wars

There has been a lot of recent traffic on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin about lions, lion killing and the overall subject of lion conservation. The latest in a long line of killings occurred just 15 kilometers from Nairobi in the village of Kitengela, where six lions were speared to death after they had killed some livestock. There were two known females and their cubs, two juveniles and two young cubs. They had come from Nairobi National Park.

I say the latest because this is, as I have written elsewhere, it is another skirmish in a long-running war.

What makes this story different is that the animals were speared to death in the presence of three armed Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) wardens after they strayed into a homestead and killed 13 sheep and goats. Different lions killed another15 goats in a nearby village.

The nuts and bolts of the Kitengela event can be summarized as two conflicts running side-by-side. There is the lion x livestock issue and then the public x government issue. The villagers were angry and vengeful because they consider that the government, in the guise of the KWS, had reneged on the promise to pay compensation at a reasonable rate.  The KWS staff were angry because, as quoted by the Star newspaper, an angry Nairobi National Park Senior Warden, Mark Cheruiyot, expressed shock at the wanton slaughter of the lions.

There have been delays in enacting the bill to raise compensation, and those delays tipped the balance as about a hundred the young men of the village collected together, armed with spears and machetes, and refused to obey the three guards.

The story went world-wide and another report featured on a National Geographic site where comments made by a few readers made it clear that the issues in Africa are simply not understood by people who have not experienced this sort of depredation. I am not going to post any pictures of dead lions this time, but if you want to see them, and also watch three videos, you can visit the site. Under the banner headline EXPLORERS JOURNAL blogger Luke Dollar uses the emotional title THE KITENGELA SIX: Outrage over lions killings in Nairobi. He cautions about graphic videos. 

The story was filed by Dr. Paula Kahumbu, blogger, tweeter and active conservationist with Wildlife Direct . She is one person among several who is trying to get more attention to this issue.

As government procrastinates, human populations numbers spiral on up and residents get ever more angry a solution has to be found. Nobody, except perhaps a livestock owner who has lost his herd, wants lions to disappear, but there is not doubt that they are doing so at a steady rate.  Where forty years ago there were 20,000 in Kenya there are now less than 2,000. 

The Maasai are just one of many African tribal groups have a very long tradition as pastoralists and value their cattle above all else in their lives. Some elders consider the cattle to be their bank accounts. While the Maaasai history included the ritual killing of lions as a rite of passage for young men into manhood in a ceremony called Olimayio almost all of the current wave of lion killing, be it by spear, gun or poison, is for revenge, known in the Maa language as Olkiyioi.

It is not just the Maasai. In December 2011, just after I spent three weeks with my family in Kenya, residents of Kitengela also took matters into their own hands in a 9-hour operation after three lions killed two cows seven donkeys and nine goats in just four days. As reporter Aby Agina of Nairobi’s NTV put it in this video “After enduring endless attacks on their livestock by roving lions residents of chose to bring this to an end. Armed with spears and machetes...” I’m sure you get the drift.

Agina also stated “The killings come after failed attempts by area residents to have Kenya Wildlife Service take action. On camera he wraps his story with “Human wildlife conflict has been and continues to remain a thorny issue in the tourism sector. The killing of wild animals by locals will deny Kenya the opportunity to compete in the global tourism market. Even as locals continue earning revenues from the local market, the question begs, ‘when will this stop?”

Paula Kahumbu is not the only one trying to alter the decline. The organization with the longest history on this battlefront is the Lion Guardians that was initiated by Dr. Laurence Frank of the University of California, Berkley. He has one of the most active predator research programs anywhere in Africa. Frank has been has been studying and trying to alleviate the ongoing conflict for over thirty years in two areas of Kenya. The most high profile is in Maasailand at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro.  You can read the annual report of the Lion Guardians here. Part of that program involved very active participation of Maasai moran who work in just about every aspect of the program and the latest event has been to award outstanding young men who have contributed in several ways to the program at an annual gathering. 

The Lion Guardians program has several components. Among them are radio collaring, GSP and radio tracking of individual lions (and therefore the prides they live in) and education. This photo, taken by the director of the program Dr. Leelah Hazzah, shows moran and Lion Guardian Mokoi using radio tracking equipmentto check on one of the lions in the Amboseli area. 

They have gone so far as to produce a DVD in the Maa language and take it to communities to show them how to deal with their nemesis. One of the key elements of the education has been to show the herders how to protect their animals at night by building better corrals (aka bomas). One way in which lions get at cattle is to panic them to such an extent that they break out of the traditional thorn bomas. Then they are easy picking.  If the fence is robust enough the cattle cannot break out and most of the problem is resolved.

Laly Lichenfeld is another person in East Africa who has been actively engaged in efforts to cut down on livestock depredation. Her work has been in Tanzania and in this video she describes how living fences of planted Comiphora trees combined with chainlink fencing have made a terrific impact as they grow stonger with time.

Quite a different approach has been taken by a bright young teenager named Richard Turere. I wonder if you can guess what he came up with. It involved an old motor cycle indicator switch and some LED lights. . You can of course check it out in this short TED YouTube piece. His efforts were so impressive that he has won a scholarship to one of Kenya’s most prestigious schools

One can be certain that lions will continue to kill prey. That is what they are all about. If the prey continues to be livestock then the lions will also be killed by angry herdsmen. A solution needs to be found, and everyone involved needs to take the matter seriously.

Wouldn't it be nice to think that this scene, a picture I snapped in 1965 in Nairobi National Park could be repeated today without wondering if the group was going to be killing someone's cattle and suffering the consequences.

Tame cheetah and an attack

Last week a report appeared on my basic news home page (BBCnews) about an attack on a British woman named Violet D’Mello. She had been mauled by a cheetah and some difficult-to-watch video footage was also out there. The story was picked up by many media outlets all over the world. It’s gory and so on, but it does have a happyish ending. Despite nasty injuries to her head, particularly to her eyes, Mrs. D’Mello survived and by now will be well on the way to recovery from the physical injuries.

I’m not here to recap the unfortunate story, but I am interested in the whole business of keeping wild animals as “pets.” It is something I have real problems with, for a variety of reasons.

Cheetahs have been “domesticated” for at least three thousand years. Tame cheetahs were used as hunting animals during the seventeenth and eighteenth Dynasty (1550-1292 BC) in Egypt.  The best-known examples date from the time of the Moghul (or Mughal) emperors in India during the 16^th and 17^th centuries AD. They had large numbers of these beautiful cats that they used for hunting, especially of the Indian blackbuck.

This picture, in the public domain, was painted by the famous Englishman, George Stubbs, best known for this many depictionsof horses. 

 

EmperorAkbar Hunting with Cheetahs – 

Akbar the Great (1556 to 1605) was reputed to have about a thousand cheetahs tamed in this way, although it is not clear if they were all owned at one time.  Adult cheetahs, that had already learned hunting skills from their mothers, were preferred to cubs, which took a lot longer to train. The cheetahs were blindfolded and “carted.” When potential quarry was seen the blindfold was removed and the hunt was on. It all sounds very much like a falconry exercise. This picture of Akbar, which I got from an intersting site on the web here

dates from the 16th century and shows him with a large retinue in attendance.The cheetahs are hunting gazelles and blackbuck.

 

During my intern year I used to see a tame cheetah at the small animal clinic at the vet school Kenya. It was really tame and would purr away as one examined it.  I’ve told the full story in my book Wrestling With Rhinos (http://www.jerryhaigh.com/book/). 

Joy Adamson and Pippa, photo taken by Andrew Botta

 I also had to deal with a tame cheetah named Pippa that conservationist Joy Adamson “owned” and claimed to be returning to the wild. That is open to question, as she did not want to lose contact with it (something she wrote in her book The Spotted Sphinx) and continued to feed it an inappropriate diet even when it had shown that it could hunt successfully and had mated with a wild cheetah and was raising a littler. That story is also told in WWR.

There do not appear to be any other accounts of a cheetah attacking a human, so I do wonder if an important element of Mrs. D’Mello’s experience was the presence of children. I have watched, with fascination and concern, as all three of Africa’s big cats have shown an unhealthy interest in small children. I wonder if they simply see them as a bite-sized snack in some sort of atavistic return to the time when humans would have been one source of prey on the open plains. 

My first experience with this phenomenon was in George Adamson’s camp at Mughwango, in Kenya’s Meru National Park. One of the several lionesses came over as we sat and drank a coffee with George. Luckily we were inside his somewhat secure chicken-wire enclosure, part of which you can see here on the left in this paicture taken by colleague and friend Roger Windsor. Two lions are asleep on and beneath the platform in the centre. The big cat simply stared us down, concentrating entirely on the three-year-old daughter of our friends. Her eyes had that scary Yumyum look.   

 

Another of Roger Windsor's photos of George.

It is not widely known that even George’s very tame lions would occasionally maul and in one case kill a human. George was himself attacked on one occasion.

A few years later I was with friends at the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa and their small daughter was sitting on her mother’s shoulders. As we stood by the cheetah pen one of the cats came over, stretched up the wire and took a very close look at the two-year old from about a metre away. It was spooky.

Storytelling and Stuck in the Maasai Mara

The Saskatoon Storytellers Guild met last week for their usual 3^rd Friday gathering. Our host this month chose “Stuck” for our theme. As she pointed out in her mail this could have many contexts and meanings and I think even she was surprised at the range and variety of stories that came out of it.

There were folks who had been stuck for words, or on a single word; folks stuck in traffic, or whose car batteries had failed in remote spots. Of course stuck in snow and ice cropped up – we do live in Saskatchewan. There was even an unfortunate younger sibling who had been taken to the outhouse (biffy, long drop) and had gone through the hole with near-disastrous consequences! Another sibling had been the subject of a prank when someone had coated a chair with contact cement!

My effort at a stuck story took me back four months to our family trip in Kenya. In December we were in the Maasai Mara and having a wonderful time doing the tourist thing. Part of the experience inevitably involved a game drive and so off we headed into the park. The rains had been heavy and I later learned that there had been none heavier since 1961. Luckily we had a very experienced driver and guide and so the black cotton soil held no terrors for us. Black cotton is a thick gumbo, glue-like substance. I have seen combine harvesters stuck in the stuff.

As we crested over s slight rise we saw, in the stream crossing below, a Toyota van thoroughly mired. Our crew hopped out and went to chat with the driver. Next thing we had backed out and made a loop across another, less sticky spot. 

We came back to the mired van and after much discussion, the employment of a towrope and some engine revving the van popped out like a champagne cork. 

 While the crew were working away I had a chat with the single tourist, a middle-aged Welshman who had been on his dream safari. He said that this was the tenth time he had been stuck that morning and then I found out why. The van was a 2-wheel drive version. I did not tell him that no one in his right mind would take a 2WD off-road anywhere in Kenya, let alone in the Mara, on black cotton, during the rains.

We parted our ways, wishing the Welshman luck and in no time our guide had seen a lion’s whisker under a small bush. Of course we went over to take a look and saw a single female with her young cub half hidden between her body and the bush.

Naturally our grand daughters thought this was “cute” and we spent some time and several photo frames recording the scene for posterity.

Suddenly the pair of them looked away from us to something behind our 4WD. Lo and behold the Welshman and his driver were just about up our exhaust pipe. After a few minutes we headed away and went on the search for the next excitement. Ben had told us that a pair of rhinos was known to be in this region of the park. The lion was just a bonus.

We looked back to see how the van was doing, only to see its wheels spinning in the muck. We did not turn back to pull or push. Not with mama lion only five metres from the vehicle.

We soon found the rhino, hanging out no more than a kilometre or so from our lion pair. Of course the cameras got rolling again. For me it was a real treat as I had put immobilizing darts into something over a hundred of them in former times, so it was a pleasure to just enjoy the spectacle.  To our relief we found that the Welshman and his driver appeared just behind us.  I did wonder how many more times they got stuck that day.

Maasai Stories

In December I was with my family in Kenya’s Maasai Mara. We stayed at Game Watchers delightful Porini Camp in the Selenkay Conservancy and of course saw a range of neat things. Our grand daughters had a truly grand time, as did our daughter and her husband and it was a delight to share with them some of the things we so love about Kenya.

Our tour guide as we drove around was a young Maasai named Ben ole Tongoyo, who has already passed his Kenya Professional Safari Guides Association silver level tour guide test and is working towards the highest level of certificate – a gold. He was very knowledgeable about many things, but it was nice to be able to share a few things that he had not picked up on.

One was the business of why hippos mark their territory by shaking their tails as they defecate. This behaviour is only done by dominant males and I showed the girls, and Ben, a spot where a hippo has marked his exit trail to deter would-be challengers.

The business of tail wagging has led to the wonderful story, that I told Ben and the family, about the desperate desire of all hippos to live in the water and escape the sun’s burning rays. After their king’s repeated conversations with Ngai (the great god who lives in the mountains), they were allowed to do so, but only during daylight hours and under strict conditions. I’m sure you know it, so I won’t repeat it.

What I will share are the skeletons of three stories that Ben gifted me as we swapped animal stories about creatures he knew well. He is not a storyteller as such, but he gave me enough to build upon. As far as I know none of these stories has ever been published.

The first was about a time a long time ago when Maasai women had cows which were wildebeest. It does show some attitudes that would not be considered PC in today’s culture, but it is an ancient story. Basically the women failed to care for their charges because of the heavy and persistent rains. After many days of neglect the cows wandered off and went on along trek, returning once a year to check things out, but never again being domesticated. Instead the women had concentrate of their other tasks, hauling wood and caring for the children. Here you can see the Maasai manyatta beyond the trees and the scattered wildebeest in the foreground. Are they waiting for attention?

The second story was about the theft of ostrich chicks by lion and how none of the animals would stand up for the upset parents until ground squirrel showed them all up.

I’m working that one up with pictures right now. Might try and publish it. 

 

The third one was how tortoise escaped his impending execution. All the other animals hated and feared him and had decided by a vote to get rid of him once and for all . That too needs a work-up.

As we departed I left my copy of the Jonathan Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals with Ben. Let’s hope it helps him in his efforts towards that gold certificate.

Lion Guardians Good news

Last December I was with my family in Kenya’s Maasai Mara and had a wonderful time. We saw all sorts of wild animals and of course my grand daughters thrilled to the sight of lions. I asked out guide, a young Maasai moran named Ben, if he had ever had to kill a lion. “Yes, three times” was his brief reply. I did not press further as he seemed somewhat embarrassed about it. He would have done it for one of two reasons.

In 2006, Leelah Hazzah, then a PhD candidate working for the Lion Guardian program on the Mbirikani group ranch beneath the majestic peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro, wrote in her thesis that there are two basic reasons why Maasai hunt lions.  The best known is their ritualized Olimayio ceremony, when young men pass into manhood. The other is for revenge, and is called Olkiyioi.

It is a really nice change to be able to write a positive report about an African conservation issue. In The Trouble With Lions (TTWL) I expressed tentative hope that the Lion Guardians program in Kenya’s Maasailand would reverse the long trend of lion killing, by spear or poison, that has been going on for far too long. A hundred and more years ago, when lions ruled the roost and terrorized humans throughout sub-Saharan Africa the Masai, Nandi and other cattle herding tribes had little choice but to try and control the depredation wreaked upon their livestock. They did it with spears in ritualized hunts that “blooded”, sometimes literally, the young men whose initiation involved a lion hunt. They were the warriors sent out to fight the enemy.

The sort of outcome that occurred was recorded by Teddy Roosevelt’s cameraman in the very early part of the 20^th century. A group of Nandi had surrounded a lion and speared it The attached picture, scanned from the book’s pages, show the results.

In TTWL I recorded the information gleaned by several scientists about the decline in lion numbers throughout Africa since about 1950, when there were about half a million on the continent. By 1975 there were about 200,000. By the end of 2006 there may have been 28,000.

Since those spearing events new ways to kill lions have emerged. Of course “white hunters” took their trophy toll with heavy rifles, but these were by no means the only methods. The most insidious are snares and poison. These two lions, poisoned with Furadan, a compound banned in the USA and Europe, were photographed by Amy Howard after the killers had stripped their manes. I have blogged before about Furadan and you can find those stories by going to the index at right.

A typical snaring may take a lot longer to kill a lion, or any other victim. This one had been snared in the Serengeti NP when veterinarian, friend and former student Dr. Patrick Garcia came across it and watched its death throes. 

The good news is that in parts of Maasailand the killing has stopped and young men are now actively engaged in lion conservation. You can read all about it, and a whole lot more, in the Lion Guardian’s annual report here, and I urge you to take a look at it, even at the risk of taking you away from my own page. Check out the 2011 report to see how things have changed. This is an important stuff!

Here is the picture taken by Leelah Hazzah of a moran named Mokoi using a telemetry receive to track one of the lions on the ranch.

Leelah, now more properly known as Dr. Hazzah, after receiving her PhD, is now the Lion Guardians Director, but of course the credit for initiating all the work goes to Dr. Laurence Frank of the University of California, Berkeley who has worked on large predators for over 40 years and is the Living With Lions Project Director.

As I said, a happy story. Long may it continue!

 

Lioness kills cub thief

Linkhttp://gorillacd.org/

As readers of this blog know well I am interested in the human x wildlife conflict, in all its forms, but particularly in Africa, my birth continent. In The Trouble With Lions I had chapters headed Lions In Trouble and Lions As Trouble. There is a third category that I had not thought of until today, when I received an email from the folks who run the Official Web site of the Virunga National Park, DR Congo, which most often posts material about the gorillas of that troubled region.

A soldier in Congo's Virunga National Park has been killed a lioness, after reportedly trying to steal 2 of her cubs. Another soldier was injured in the incident.

Surely a tragedy for the men’s families, but WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

It occurs to me that there is a fair chance that these men came under the influence of an organized crime group. We know, from several reports, that organized crime in the wildlife field is on the upsurge world-wide. What price would some oriental billionaire with more money than he knows what to do with, and no semblance of a conscience, pay for a couple of ultimate status symbols? Of course the soldiers would have been offered a reward for their "work". A pittance for the crime boss, maybe a decent sum for the soldiers.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a chapter title that would cover this incident?

Canine Distemper in a new species

Linkhttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TD6-4X9TTTY-6&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d3ed97ecb6027210b92b683fe472e67d, http://wdin.blogspot.com/, http://asuka.wildlifedirect.org/2007/03/

Once again the Wildlife Disease Listserv and blog has provided an entry into a convoluted story of disease among wildlife, domestic animals and even people.

A recent report published in the journal Microbiology has further broadened the range of species that can contract and die from a nasty virus disease once thought to occur, as its name implies, in dogs. It is canine distemper. The title of the article, written by Zhaozeng Sun, Aixue Li and their colleagues, is Natural Infection with Canine Distemper Virus in Hand-feeding Rhesus Monkeys in China.

It has been known for many years that some other species can contract the virus, or its very close relatives, and it seems obvious that the virus itself is able to undergo slight changes that allow it to infect new hosts. In the last thirty years it has been seen in seals (hence phocine distemper), dolphins, and other species. In Africa it had devastating effects on the African Wild Dog populations and was reported in jackals and hyaenas. It would be no surprise to learn that it also killed other canids like bat-eared foxes, but they tend to fly a bit under the radar and do not have the charismatic appeal of the larger species – they only weigh about 3 kg. Then in 1994 an epidemic occurred in lions in the Serengeti, killing an estimated 30% of the population, something like 1000 animals, in two years!

As I wrote in The Trouble With Lions

“There is a dramatic, but grim, movie clip shown on the Glasgow Veterinary College web site, taken by modeler Professor Ray Holborn, of a lion in the Serengeti in the throes of a grand mal seizure, which is one of the classic signs of distemper”.

I have just spent a fruitless 30 minutes trying to find the video, but it seems to have been taken down.

In dogs some of the classic signs of distemper are fever, loss of appetite, respiratory symptoms and thickening of the footpad. Another name for the condition used to be “Hardpad” and at one time this was even thought to be a different disease. Distemper was once a major killer of inner-city dogs in Glasgow and we students used to go into slum areas and take part in free vaccination clinics. This is much the same as the clinics that now take place around national parks like the Serengeti and Masai Mara in Kenya and Tanzania. You can read more about this on the Wildlife Direct blog here.

Many dogs developed central nervous system signs and seizures were common before they went on to die. There is no mention of CNS signs in any species other than the lions, but deaths certainly occurred. That is exactly what took place in the Chinese Rhesus monkeys where twelve of twenty that were sick went on to die.

So, will distemper jump to humans? Maybe it has done so already, aeons ago, in the form of measles. We may be lucky, because the distemper and measles viruses are closely related. So much so that for many years measles vaccine was used to protect puppies. Another point. When measles vaccines programs fail, or folks take decision not to vaccinate children, the consequences can be terrible. Measles was once a major factor in many areas of the world where European invaders arrived and brought the disease to fully susceptible people.

Wildlife declines in Kenya

Link

My In Box of yesterday carried an interesting Kenya-based article from the Wildlife Diseases News Digest. The somewhat over the top headline “Kenya on the brink of recording big five extinction” is at least an attention grabber. It came from the East African Standard and highlights, once again, the problems that plague the country’s wildlife situation.

The article, dated June 7th, is by one Joe Kiarie and tells how four cows were killed by lions in the community of Oloolaimutiak within the Masai Mara National Reserve. Naturally the villagers reacted and laced the carcasses with poison. ONE young lion died within 100 metres of the scene and four others are missing. The inevitable “by-kill” of vultures occurred.
No poison is named, but it is a racing certainty that they used Furadan. Important questions remain. How did they get the stuff? Was it some residual stock or were they able to purchase it in a village shop? In the past many shops carried signs such as “Agricultural Supplies” and in them Furadan was readily available. As those who saw the CBS 60 Minutes show in March this year will recall the manufacturers of the chemical stated that they would discontinue its supply. If you missed it, I referred to it in my blogs of March 15th & 29th.

It is not just lions and poison that Kiarie mentions. He states “Three days before, a poacher was shot dead after he was caught removing a horn from a black rhino in Laikipia.” This picture accompanies his article. He goes on to mention some other species. These include roan and sable antelope (the black one with the huge horns), Hirola, or Hunter’s antelope and Grevy’s zebra. Rather than bore with numbers, the Grevy’s shows the trend. In 1970 there were thought to be some 20,000 head in East Africa (many in Ethiopia). Perhaps there are 18,00 today, and many of these are on private reserves. This picture, taken by Dick Neal in Kenya in 1975 shows a mixed aggregation of the common or Burchell’s zebra, with their broad stripes, and the taller, large eared Grevy’s with the narrow stripes. It has been suggested that there may be fewer Grevy’s zebra than there are the much higher profiled black rhino in Africa.

In a related article by Beatrice Obwocha of the 11th of May this year the plight of one of the world’s great sights, the massed ranks of flamingos on Kenya’s Lake Nakuru. In a nutshell, the numbers are at an all-time low. There may not have been more than a thousand of them after the long drought between November and March. Contrast this with numbers that were once thought to exceed half a million.
And why? Partly the drought (an estimated 100,000 returned between March and May), but a much bigger and long-term problem comes from human activity. The water source for the lake lies on the escarpment above it. Water levels are down, alkalinity is up, and the algae upon which the birds feed are not thriving. On top of this the nearby town of Nakuru has grown enormously and the sewage and agricultural waste from the surrounding farms all drain into the lake.

What neither author mentioned up front is the core problem of human population expansion, which inevitably leads to crowding for space and diminishing resources. When people’s livelihoods and way of life are threatened they will react, either vigorously, in the case of lion attacks, or insidiously, even unknowingly, in the Lake Nakuru example.

Masai Mara Wildlife Populations

Linkhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8008700.stm, http://www.physorg.com/news159599572.html

A report on the BBC website (here) shows once more how wildlife populations in Africa continue to decline in the face of human population expansions. With annual increases in the human populations continuing to be over 3%, and in some cases even over 4% this is not a big surprise. When you put those numbers on to a spread sheet you soon learn that the number of people will double roughly every twenty years. The increase in human settlement has a direct effect jupon the wild animals
Of course these people need a place to live and so the number of dwellings increases, and also the number of cattle, as cattle are the main currency for the tribes in the area and even more, for the Maasai, they are the reasons to live.

Here a herd of wildebeest in the foreground is living almost cheek by jowl with cattle that are linked to the Maasia manyatta in the middle of the picture.

Hunting, although illegal inside the reserve, is another factor. It is conducted for food and profit as the bushmeat trade lends significant income for some families.

A study telling the story and conducted by a team from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has recently been published in the May 2009 issue of the British Journal of Zoology.

"The situation we documented paints a bleak picture and requires urgent and decisive action if we want to save this treasure from disaster,"

said Joseph Ogutu, the lead author of the study and a statistical ecologist at ILRI.

“Numbers of giraffe, warthog, impala, topi and hartebeest fell by 50% or more between 1979 and 2002.”

"The numbers of lions are going down. The cheetah numbers are declining. The wild dogs in the Mara system have become extinct."

By 2002, numbers of giraffe in the reserve had fallen to 20% of their 1979 levels, the bulk of those losses occurring before 1989. Topi and hartebeest in the reserve fell to less than half their 1979 levels, and almost disappeared in some of the neighbouring ranchlands where they once grazed. Impala fell by 70% in the Mara itself, while warthog fell by more than 80%, although their numbers appeared steady since 1989.

Is there any chance that human population increases will flatten out? Not much, when all the elements are factored in. The Pope has again condemned the use of condoms, and for many people large families are simply a fact of life. The doubling effect is relentless and the pressures on the ecosystem will continue.

An injured lion in QEP

The last day in Queen Elizabeth NP was productive but exhausting. We started the day with a brief meeting with the Community Conservation Warden, Wilson Kagoro, and made arrangements for day trips for senior pupils from both Kasenyi Primary School and Equator Highway Primary School to have a day out. Forty children from each school will be picked up and brought to the park HQ where they will be fed, shown around, and given some conservation classes. The highlight of the trip will be the two-hour boat ride on the Kasinga channel, the same ride that we all took last Friday.

I dropped by Kasenyi Primary School to how the solar equipment was working. One DVD had already been shown to the kids, and Gorrit had prepared two meals with the solar oven. I asked her to pose outside her home with this useful piece of equiemt as I had managed to forget to take a pic the other day.

Then we set out to continue our research efforts with buffalo. This proved pretty frustrating and for four hours we were unable to get near enough any animals to dart one. However, the group traveling with me in the university Land Cruiser did see a very lame female lion with three half-grown cubs Both her left hind and right front legs were obviously hurting her and she would have had a hard time hunting, even with hundreds of kob around her. By the time we caught up with the rest of the team we had also found a sick buffalo.

We decided to try and examine the buffalo first, as the lioness was unlikely to move far. We did get one dart into her, but unfortunately it deflected of a wisp of grass and we were never able to get close enough again to do any more. Eventually we left her and returned to the lions.

It was not long before Dr. Ludwig Siefert had a dart in her and we were able to make a very detailed examination. This picture shows the small lesions on her gums and where she had recently lost a tooth in her lower jaw. She had obviously been in a fight.There were several bite wounds in her legs, and a claw on her rear leg had been torn off. The worst lesion was a deep penetrating bite mark low down on her right front leg. An hour later she had been weighed, her wounds had been cleaned up and she had been given a healthy dose of antibiotics. I took a bunch of pictures of the bite marks with my new cell phone, as well of a couple of short video clips of her being weighed, but I have not figured out how to download them on to this computer. Sorry ‘bout that, all I have is a pic of her getting a much needed does of fluids under the skin. An hour after that she was up and moving.

Next stop Lake Mburo National Park, but complete lack in Internet until about the 25th.

Lion Conservation Successes

It is a nice change to be able to report the good rather than the depressing about wildlife issues anywhere. Here is more good news from Kenya and the Lion Guardians of the Kilimanjaro region. Their annual report, written by Leela Hazzah, Antony Kasanga and Amy Howard is mostly upbeat and gives one hope. Much of what I am about to report is lifted, with copy and paste, direct from their report.

"Since the rains, the lion population has tripled on Mbirikani; we estimate that there are currently between 13‐16 lions on the ranch. Many of these lions are moving here from Amboseli National Park, and the group ranch surrounding it, and from the southern border of the ranch from neighboring Kuku Group Ranch"

Of course no one should imagine that the lions have decided on a cattle amnesty. This photo, taken by Anthony Kasanga shows Lion Guardian Kapande with a cow killed by a lion on the ranch. It is simply that through the Predator Compensation Fund (PCF) herdsmen can be compensated for cattle that are proven to be lion victims. Since the launch of PCF there has been a dramatic decrease in lion killing, while lion killing has continued unabated outside the ranch boundaries.

For instance on neighbouring ranches, where no PCF, or even a guardians program, exists, there have been a minimum of seven lions killed in the past year. Leelah and her team-mates are in the process of starting up the Lion Guardians program in these areas, in the hope of reducing lion killing.

Program members spend at least three days a week monitoring predators, ranging from lions to some of the smallest of all, like the genet. Currently there are eight collared lions being monitored by the Guardians.
These photos, taken my Amy Howard, show some aspects of the program.

One collared male lion, Ndelie, has recently been fitted with an Iridium GPS collar. This enables us, and the general public, to monitor his activities via the internet

Another new development has been that the court system has begun to deal seriously with people who kill lions. There have been three arrests this year that led to substantial fines. A man who poisoned two lions was fined the equivalent of US$ 1000, and two murrans caught in possession of lions claws intended for sale on the coast were fined USD $1250. The claws would possible have fetched as much as US$ 3000, so, as always, some rich buyer(s) are just as guilty.

This is obviously a very brief synopsis of a detailed nine-page report. Anyone who wants more can either email me and I can send a pdf copy, or get in touch directly with the folks in Kenya through their web site.