What does our relationship with lions need to become, if this ancient conflict is to come to dusk in such a way that an early morning air that’s charged with the roaring of the dawn chorus still greets the sunrise?
And there she still is; and so it hasn’t worked.
Conserving a bird species, then, by dedicating the vast majority of your time and effort to the human communities that share space with it.
It is a singular relationship, that which exists between humans and lions.
That the first tentative steps toward deep, eventual friendship, informed by a self-interest in easy food as those steps may have been, were taken, willingly, by wolves.
I have, for so long now, found so little wild, so few pockets without their shadow, and so few of the wilder, natural prey. They are not within my grasp.
Trophy hunting has been around an awful long time, and for that entire time lions have been the most prized trophy of all. If it hunting lions is conservation, then it is the longest running conservation project that I know of, and, given the current state of lion populations, a somewhat unsuccessful one at that.
