The Lions of Gir: From Hunting to Scavenging

We all need to celebrate the increase in the number of lions at Gir which now is at the highest ever at 674. On the brink of extinction at less than a 100, in the year 1900, and barely managing to touch 327 over the century till 2001, it is in the last 20 years that the lion population has more than doubled. That success came out of a series of careful efforts and sustained policing by Sasan Gir National Park authorities that helped protect and nurture the lion. But within this success, there is a hidden threat that could annihilate lions, their number, and also their character. India’s lion strategy, therefore, needs to change before that threat plays out.

 Success breeds risk

Lions attract lakhs of tourists who generate income and employment in an area where the economic potential is limited. The need to showcase the lions motivates Sasan Gir National Park authorities to provide the lions with feed-bait as easy food. So not only do the lions get food easily, but they also are becoming more and more comfortable with humans. A study by the Wildlife Institute of India cautioned that though lions are increasing in numbers, they are becoming less like human-avoiding hunters, and more like scavengers that are comfortable in the periphery of humans.

If this combination of preference for food-bait overhunting, and reduced mistrust of human presence due to greater tourist-lion contact continues, the character of hunter-lions will change. Already more lions are found where there are tourists and food-bait than where their natural game like chital are present. The fear is that over time human-lion conflict would increase as lions avoid the game and look to livestock for their nutrition.  

But that is not all, the socialization of lions is also changing, researchers find that lions that gravitate around tourist and food bait areas are in larger prides with 5-7 females per pride as opposed to 2-3. How this might change the character of lions is difficult to ascertain at this point.

But there is another issue with the concentration of lions at Gir Sasan National Park, if they are all in one area, they are more susceptible to disease and even natural disasters. The classic example is that of Canine Distemper Virus (CDV) infection in Serengeti that killed about a thousand lions in 1994. In India as well a combination of diseases is responsible for 199 lion deaths in the period 2018-19, as per my estimate this would be about 20 per cent of all lions present then.

Image: https://tinyurl.com/ybg2ulsk

The reluctance of Gujarat state authorities

Increasing numbers, changing individual and social character, human-lion conflict, risk of infections, risk of natural causes all point to the obvious deduction that India needs to spread its lion population in more than one location. I would have in fact said, let us have an agenda for 2 additional locations.  But the Wildlife Institute of India identified just one more location which was the Kuno-Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh in the 1990s. The Madhya Pradesh state government relocated more than 1500 families from 23 villages in 1996 in anticipation of the Asiatic lion. 

But almost a quarter of a century later, the lions did not show up. Gujarat would not part with its lions. Why? A lot of reasons were provided, all of them quite weak. Pushed by wildlife activists the Supreme Court of India looked into the matter. Kuno is richer in game, has adequate space, and even the local population is welcoming, and so it ruled in 2014 that Gujarat must share its lions with Madhya Pradesh. But that has not helped either.

Lions have been growing in number steadily since 1990 and the state of Gujarat and Sasan Gir National Park authorities must have done much more than is usual to protect the great cat. In fact not only are the numbers rising, but the rate of growth of lions have also been steadily rising from 7 per cent in the 1990-95 period to 27 per cent in 2010-15 to 29 per cent in the 2015-2020 period.  

In other words, though lions have been growing in number, the rate of growth is slowing down, and this suggests that something is constraining that growth. Using a constrained growth model, a linear projection shows that if the same growth pattern continues, we should expect upwards of 811 lions in 2030. The critical factor here is that given the fact that there are too many lions, space will be a constraint and constrained growth model works best.  

Between 2018-19 almost 200 lions died in Sasan Gir due to natural causes; a combination of Canine Distemper Virus (CDV) that weakens the immune system and Babesiosis that kills by clogging the arteries is the commonly ascribed reason. If there are 674 lions now and 199 died due to natural causes in 2018-19, and lions have an average span of 10-14 years, it is obvious that somewhere about 20 per cent of lions died out due to such infections. Such a large number strongly suggests that space is getting to be a constraint, and this will worsen over time.

Many more lions will be born and no doubt the Gir authorities would do their best, but many will not be able to survive. Space is an inherent constraint in Gir. If we expand space by loosening the boundaries of Gir, the hitherto protected lions will come into contact with more and more humans, something that’s avoidable. If the boundaries are not loosened however, the lions will come into conflict with each other as well as nature. That is also avoidable. Gujarat’s current solution is greater love and care, improved protection, antibiotics etc. All of that is creditable no doubt, but it is human-aided support and has its limitations. Most importantly, such lions will be less natural bred and more dependent on humans.

The solution

Nothing in nature works in a linear manner. Lions procreate and can increase faster if conditions are right. And those conditions are simply space, nutrition, and protection. The first of space and nutrition would be better possible if some lions are shifted to other locations that are rich in game and sparsely populated as well, be they in Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan or Chhatisgarh. The third condition, protection, can broadly be classified into

(a) protection against natural calamities and

(b) protection against ailments and disease and

(c) protection from humans (poaching and also tourism). 

Of these, the first two would also be better served if there is more than one location for the great lion. And for the last, protection from humans, will depend upon our ecological policy.

In an ideal world, the objective of ecological policy is to reduce damage to the ecology and for me, that means reducing human intervention in its workings. However, the technology that provides humans with improved lifestyles requires a massive amount of infrastructure and agriculture. Both eat into natural spaces. And therefore, humanity intervenes intensively, sometimes to undo its own mess, but mostly it is the collateral damage of the growth process. The story of the lion illustrates that even too much protection is an intervention and it causes a different kind of damage than simply extinction.  

The first best solution therefore is, minimal but not zero protection. We need to mark out at least three such areas (Gir is one, Kuna is already decided, and another one needs to be identified). The lions will need to be translocated using global and local expertise, and after the initial support to ensure familiarity, the lions and those areas need to be left alone.  

For some, however, that may not be good enough. There is an argument that humans can only protect what it knows it is protecting. Therefore, according to this argument, humans need to see the lion, this helps generate the larger political momentum to allocate land and financial resources for this royal hunter’s protection. I don’t agree with this view but if at all human visits are allowed, they should be limited. Therefore, if we limit the number of human visits and do not use practices such as bait-feed, we can protect from poacher and tourist alike. 

And so, India’s potential lion policy is fairly straightforward: India needs to mark out more than one location, at least two apart from Gir, and carefully translocate the identified lions to them over the next 2-3 years. We need to protect them from poachers and tourists alike. After the initial safety period is through, limited tourism could be allowed in those areas. And practices such as bait-feed have to stop everywhere, be it Gir or in the new locations.

And what about the potential forest dweller-lion conflict? I will need to take that up later, for I have run out of space, just like the lions of Gir.