Tumaren

Category: Issues | Date: Mar 27 2007 | By: tumaren

David Mech, the American Wolf Biologist once suggested that allowing ranchers to shoot and kill the occasional wolf predating their livestock would allow ranchers recourse to fix their own problems without resorting to poisoning, the more deadly and indiscriminate killer of predators as well as scavengers. I wonder if the same theory could apply to Lions. As social predators Lions might behave in some of the same ways as a wolf pack. Mr Mech has suggested that you can typically kill a couple wolves from a pack but quite quickly the remainder become very shy and refrain from the activities that brought on the trouble in the first place. I would imagine that Lions would behave in the same way.

I bring up this point simply as something to think about and discuss. We live in a part of the world where a large number of pastoral people must coexist with predators that routinely eat their livelyhood. Poisoning, a far more terrifying solution has been widely used in Kenya to Kill predators in the past. Through poisoning alone the American government was able to nearly eliminate the wolf population from the lower 48 and Mr. Mech has suggested that this would never have been possible if those predator control agents were only given guns. Have authors made similar suggestions when it comes to large predator control in Africa?