When the Last Lion Roars by Sara Evans

Author:Sara Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

While people with their weapons and snares are an obvious menace, lion populations have been placed in peril by another threat, one unseen and unheard as it approaches. In modern times, disease, in its many long-named guises, has been the killer of thousands of lions – with feline immunodeficiency virus, canine distemper virus and bovine tuberculosis being the most well-known and potentially devastating diseases.

Similar to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) compromises the immune systems of big cats. At first, lions with FIV don’t show obvious signs of sickness and can appear perfectly healthy for years. But beneath the skin, the disease weakens lions’ immunity to disease and infection. For example, lions with FIV find it harder to survive parasitic infections, including tapeworm and hookworm.

Lions pass on FIV by biting and during mating. Females can pass the virus on to their cubs. In Botswana, South Africa and Tanzania almost 100 per cent of lion populations in certain areas are infected. Other populations, including those in West Africa and at Namibia’s Etosha National Park, appear to be free of the virus, although some scientists suggest they may have a strain of the virus not yet identified.

However, unlike domestic cats, which are likely to die from the disease, wild African lions, according to a related IUCN factsheet, show no ‘evidence that FIV infection results in increased mortality’. The same factsheet also states that although FIV has only been recognised since the 1980s, lions may well have had the disease quite ‘possibly for thousands of years’ and developed immunity to it. Studies of infected lions at Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and the Kruger National Park in South Africa have all shown that the disease is ‘not a health threat’.

As a precaution, though, the IUCN suggests that lions which are FIV-negative, including those at the Etosha National Park in Namibia and Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park in South Africa, should not be translocated to populations where lions do have FIV, because ‘these lions may not be resistant to FIV induced disease as they have not had a chance to adapt to the virus during evolution’.

In 1994, in early February, tourists flying over the Serengeti National Park in a hot-air balloon at sunrise spotted the first lion believed to be suffering from canine distemper virus (CDV), a condition that affects digestion, breathing and neurological systems. The lion, a male, was seen twitching and convulsing, until eventually it collapsed on the dry earth beneath it. By sunset the lion was dead.

Within a year, around a thousand lions – a third of the park’s population – had died the same way. CDV outbreaks weren’t confined to Tanzania; they spread across the border to Kenya and into the Masai Mara where lions soon displayed typical symptoms of circling behaviour, muscle twitching, head jerking and involuntary movements of the jaw, known as chewing gum fits, as well as fits and seizures.

The source of the CDV was traced to the domestic dogs, around 30,000 of them, that lived in the villages dotted around the park’s edges.

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