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Lions and Tigers and Bears In 1993, North American zoos decided to form the first SSP for an animal that wasn’t threatened or endangered—the African lion. Most of the lions found in zoos up until then were of unknown genetic heritage. We had been breeding lions in zoos without much regard for ancestry—because they weren’t exactly rare or difficult to reproduce, and because they had been bred in zoos for so long, there simply weren’t good records. The SSP concluded that it would be easier to just let all of the existing zoo lions die out and gradually replace them with lions of known parentage. Ideally, those lions would all come from the wild. I was not crazy about the idea. Here we were devoting a considerable amount of energy to a subspecies, the African lion, that wasn’t in the least bit of trouble, when we had another subspecies, the Asian lion, which was on the edge of extinction. People don’t often think about it, but lions once ranged up through Greece and Macedonia through what is now Turkey and from there all the way into India. Remember all those fables where Greek guys are getting thorns out of the lion’s foot? Well, they didn’t take place in subSaharan Africa. They took place in Greece, with Asian lions. Of course, they’re mostly gone, now. In 2002 the numbers of Asian lions were estimated at 280, with most of those animals living in the Gir Forest in India. This is an area of about eighteen hundred square miles in northern India. With the growing human population in this region, though, the lions’ 115 7 effective habitat is now down to about eight hundred square miles. We don’t know how many animals there are for sure, because the ones we think might be Asian lions have probably been crossbred enough with African lions that they are no longer, in effect, “purebreds.” Asian lions don’t look much different when compared with African lions, so I’m not sure it makes much difference. Then again, a regular horse probably wouldn’t look that much different from a unicorn. I’d still like to see a unicorn, though. The most visible differences between Asian and African lions are that the Asian lions have a fold of skin running along the abdomen, and their manes look a little different in the males. The crossbreeding of Asian and African lions goes all the way back to Roman times. They were moving lions around the empire and breeding them with one another with no regard at all for parentage. In order to save the Asian lion from extinction, we could have organized a push to fund the census work, the necessary genetic testing, and the importation and breeding of the remaining Asians. In fact, we could still probably save them from extinction . The prevailing feeling, though, was that it is too much work for too little return and that we should just concentrate on African lions. I still disagree with the decision. In the same year that the AZA decided to form an SSP for lions, the Indianapolis Zoo’s only male lion died. The zoo’s first male, Kitaba, lived to the age of nineteen. Since their life expectancy in the wild is quite a bit less than fifteen years, he was getting on in age. After his death, the zoo acquired a new male named Lionel from the Potter Park Zoo. He had been raised by a truck driver who had kept him in his cab for company (and probably as a deterrent to theft). The truck driver fed him live chickens for amusement. When he got big enough that he was no longer cute, the truck driver dropped him off at Potter Park. He died seven years later, leaving the Indianapolis Zoo without a breeding male. At the same time, the zoo had two females that were nearing twenty years of age. Shortly after the death of the big male, we lost a female due to complications related to old age. But in September, we learned of two lions that were available for export to the United States. Their names were Mwangi, which in Swahili means “he will have many children,” and Shamfa, Swahili for “sunshine.” They had been kept illegally on an African farm. When wildlife authorities found them, they were confiscated and sent to the Pretoria Zoo. Pretoria didn...

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