Nicky Barker
KwaZulu-Natal Nature Conservation Service officials are deeply concerned about the future of the lion population in their flagship Hluhluwe-Umfolozi game reserve.
The 80 lions left have been diagnosed with bovine tuberculosis (TB), an exotic disease introduced in the past 50 years by cattle imported from Europe.
There is no cure for wild animals with TB, and there is little hope for the last lions of Hluhluwe.
A few years ago tourists began writing letters to newspapers, complaining that the lions looked sickly. The Hluhluwe veterinarians and rangers, who had been aware of the problem for some time, stepped up their observations.
”We darted some lions and examined them for every infection known to occur in lions,” says Dr Dave Cooper, the nature conservation service veterinarian, ”but after screening about a quarter of the lion population of the park, we couldn’t find anything. We had to give the lions a clean bill of health, but cub mortality in some prides continued to be abnormally high and the lions still looked sick and weak.”
The only answer was that the lions were showing genetic weaknesses because of inbreeding – a likely explanation in view of their history.
”The first lion arrived in the reserve entirely under his own steam,” says Dave Balfour, the reserve’s regional ecologist. ”It is believed he wandered down from Mozambique, pursued by every gun-happy farmer in Zululand who had pretensions to bagging a lion. At that stage Hluhluwe was not fenced, and he obviously found the place refreshingly free of gun-toting humans.”
For two years he lived on his own, and then he was joined mysteriously by two lionesses. It is suspected they were smuggled in by game rangers who wanted a lion population in Hluhluwe but did not feel like filling in the forms. The present lions of the park are all descended from this founder population.
In the late 1980s there was extensive culling of male lions in the park, as they had the potential to be problem animals. This further thinned out the gene pool. The theory about dangerous inbreeding was taken seriously enough for the park management to motivate for a fresh batch of lions to be brought in from Etosha.
But then disaster struck. At the beginning of this year a chance test on a lion showed it had TB, a disease that is cutting a swathe through the wild animal populations of South African game reserves. It is a slow degenerative disease in animals, carried by buffalo, and the lions would have picked up the virus by preying on infected animals.
The discovery of TB in the Hluhluwe felines changed everything. It was no longer feasible to introduce lions if they were going to run the risk of becoming infected.
Research into TB in wild animals is in its infancy – a full-time research study was launched only a few months ago at the Kruger National Park. Very little is known about how the disease is spread, how it affects animals and what its symptoms are.
It is not even known how many animals, or which animals, are infected. The only way to establish its presence is through a post-mortem. But there is, at the moment, no cure.
Dr Dewald Keet, National Parks Board veterinarian, says only buffalo and cattle are carriers of the disease. Even though all animals can be infected by buffalo – even the smaller animals like jackals and scrub hares – they cannot catch the bacteria from each other.
The only answer, and one which is currently being put into practice by the KwaZulu-Natal Nature Conservation Service, is to identify and round up disease-free groups of animals and transport them to areas like Kimberley, where the dry air prevents the natural spread of the disease. Groups of disease-free buffalo from Hluhluwe have already been moved to safety.
If the infection continues to rage, all the diseased animals in the park would have to be removed or destroyed and replaced with disease-free buffalo. Buffalo – although extremely expensive to quarantine – are fairly easy to acclimatise to captivity. Lions would be a lot more difficult, and small animals like scrub hares and jackals would be impossible.
It might become necessary to remove all the buffalo, wait for the disease to play itself out, and then move in a new crop of disease-free animals. This is an option that is not even being considered by the conservation service until the disease is better understood.
Whatever the options are, there is one certainty: the process will be a long one. Until the disease is better understood, or perhaps until the disease has played itself out in its enclosed areas, the last lions of Hluhluwe appear to be doomed.