“Good fences make good neighbors”—especially if your neighbors are lions!
In most corners of the planet, humans and big predators don’t live together easily. People use land for cities and farms. They don’t want predators around. No one wants a neighbor that can eat people and their cattle for breakfast! People who live near lions start thinking about lions as the bad guys—and even kill them.
On the plains of northern Tanzania, zebras, buffalo, and giraffes munch grass and leaves. In the same space, lions, leopards, and hyenas stalk these wild beasts. What a wild neighborhood! But it’s tame too. Pastoralists—people who graze animals for a living—have lived there for a long time. Their cows, goats, and sheep roam the same broad savannahs that lions do.
Tanzania may be one of the few places left on Earth where people and predators can keep coexisting. And what happens in Tanzania could save lions—or wipe them out. About 22,500 African lions are left. One out of every three of those lions lives in Tanzania.
Are people and lions living together well there? It seems like it. People build new corrals to keep predators out. Fewer livestock attacks take place.
Lion hunts do still happen. This summer, people snapped a photo of a dead lion with its four paws and tail removed. This kind of killing is an old ritual. Still, people hunt lions less often than they used to. The local lion population is starting to bounce back. A lion cub grows in its mother’s womb for almost four months before birth. Once lions are safe, their population can grow fast.
But some want the lions fenced in. In Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park, lions sleep on open river banks and dangle from tree branches (just like cats—which is what they are!). But lions migrate. They follow the rains over huge areas. So lions and their prey leave the park for a lot of the year. They can’t be trapped inside the park and thrive.
That’s not what you want to hear if you live next door.
Neema Loshiro is a 60-year-old woman selling handmade jewelry in the village of Loibor Siret. She says, “We don’t want to hear lions roar at night.”
