Love of lions on display during ‘Big Cat Week’
BEVERLY HILLS, California - When we think of endangered species we
think of the red wolf, the black rhinoceros or even the short-haired
chinchilla - if we think of them at all. But people rarely consider the
big cats.
Still, they are among that elite group of animals (along with man)
who are just trying to make it through the night.
Nat Geo Wild will chronicle some of these lithe predators when it
plays its own game of Hello, Kitty with “Big Cat Week”.
One of the featured films will be “The Last Lions” by Dereck and
Beverly Joubert, wildlife photographers and researchers who’ve been
stalking the stalkers for 30 years.
“One of the alarming things for us, which was the sort of genesis of
this film and this ‘Big Cat Week,’ actually, is that we discovered that
in our lifetimes, lion numbers have dropped from 450,000 down to 20,000,
and the leopard numbers are from 700,000 down to 50,000,” says Dereck
Joubert.
It’s hard to believe, but more tigers are living in captivity today
than in the wild.
“And by that sort of extension of curve, you will imagine these big
cats to be extinct within the next 10 or 15 years,” he says.
“So we are very definitely passionate about big cats. We’ve been
working on this for a long time, but now is the time for us to bring it
to the attention - what we’re so excited about with the ‘Big Cat Week’
is that we found a broadcast on National Geographic that will actually
give us an entire week and a platform to get this across, which is
fantastic,” he says.
The Jouberts were born in South Africa, but say they moved to
Botswana because they “needed to go out into the real Africa. ... I
thought that the big cats would lead us into a greater understanding of
the rest of Africa, and then we kind of got stuck there,” says Dereck.
Why the big cats? Why not apes or crocodiles or prairie dogs? “They
really are the iconic species in Africa,” says Beverly.
“Without saving the apex predator, we’re going to lose vast tracts of
land. If the apex predator is taken out of the system, the whole system
will collapse.
But also, man will move into the system, and man will eventually take
every single animal out of there as bush meat. So we ultimately need to
keep the apex predators alive so that we’ve got corridors for elephants,
for antelope, and the tiny little dung beetles. It is vitally
important.”Part of the “Big Cats Week” is the National Geographic’s Big
Cats Initiative (BCI), a long-term commitment to staunch the decline of
these denizens of the wild.
While cheetahs have disappeared from more than 75 percent of their
range, the cheetah story offers a glimmer of hope, says Dereck
Joubert.“Cheetahs today came out of a genetic bottleneck of about 200
individuals and then grew back up to about 45,000 to 50,000. Today
they’re down around 12,000. But the fact that you can actually recover a
species is what gives us so much hope, and we think that we can do
exactly the same with lions and leopards.”
“A lot of people don’t believe there is even a problem, so they all
feel, ‘Why should we worry?’” says Beverly.
“But through the Big Cats Initiative, we’ve just managed to raise a
lot of money for cheetahs, so we will have a lot of cheetah programs out
there. We’re not only looking at lions and leopards.”
The Jouberts spend days upon end watching wildlife do its thing. They
see the animals prosper and perish. Sometimes it’s hard to watch and not
intervene, says Beverly.
“It’s heart-wrenching. On a daily basis it’s heart-wrenching. So I
don’t know if we’ve got a certain personality.
We have a concern of looking at the bigger picture and wanting to
protect wildlife in general. And so it is wrong of us to believe that we
are going to play God with nature. This has been happening for millions
of years.
-The Kansas City Star
|