Hungry villagers have been caught stealing meat from the nearly extinct lions of Waza National Park.
The villagers likely scare off the lions with sticks or fire shortly after they make a fresh kill. Researchers fear the practice may be more common than previously thought, and it may help explain why lion numbers are plummeting in Cameroon.
The stealing of food from another is called kleptoparasitism, and it’s actually a common practice among animals like lions and hyena. But it was thought rare for humans to get in on the act– until now. According to researcher Hans de Iongh: “From interviews with Bororo herdsmen, we have learned that it is a common habit among this tribe to chase away lions from fresh kills.”
One incident was recently recorded in the African Journal of Ecology. On the morning of the 28 March 2006, biologists came across a lion they were tracking while it was feeding on a fresh kill. As the vehicle approached, the lions fled the scene until the researchers left. Later in the day the researchers returned to the site, but this time they found only local villagers around the carcass. Almost all of the meat had been stripped away by knife, and it had been packaged using leaves gathered nearby.
People are stealing the meat to get an easy source of protein, but the backdoor theft is likely coming at a significant cost for the lions. Lion numbers in Waza National Park have gone from around 60 a decade ago to only around 12-20 today. Poaching by livestock owners likely accounts for most of the decline. But given the enormous energy it can take for lions to make a kill, the stolen meat undoubtedly adds to the hardship of their survival.
“This may have a serious impact on a lion population which is already under serious stress by human encroachment and may eventually contribute to more rapid extinction,” said de Iongh.
Source: BBC Earth News
Image Credit: colinjackson1972 on Flickr under a CC License
About Bryan Nelson
I didn’t know Hungary was in Africa!
Herr Hitler was more right than wrong! Clean Africa of all marginal human life and make it a garden for either , Chinese or European immigrants! AIDs, a plague sent by G d to kill off the marginally useful parts of humanity must be left to do its terrible task! Making room for European and Chinese immigrants is not only necessary for a dying Europe and a very over-populated Asia, it will help exploit properly, industriously and economically, the riches of this to date barren continent! G d’s plan, a sexually transmitted plague was designed to allow the most moral survive and be left to be integrated into the new population, and this will in fact eventually come to be! Much negroid blood has been preserved, albeit in brutal fashion, by primarily the Anglican church and slavery, but slavery is often the threshold, the “boot-camp” to integration, a far kinder fate than extermination! Feed the humans in this article for a day and you get more foraging environmentally disastrous of the same species and with the same ambitions! Exterminate them, with AID’s or otherwise, and replace them with more industrious, more civilized breeds of humans and a rich progressive society, a benefit to all mankind can flourish! native Africans have had centuries to build on their continent, and have wasted it, and they will have to move over, especially now, with the resource shortages world wide, and let others try to do better there! Eating offal, For shame, Shame on humanity!
I feel for the “hardship” of the villagers…
Once again, the harsh reality of our humanity.