An interview with biologist
Combining sound science with practical interventions is key to
saving the big cats
Big cats are some of Earth's largest and most threatened predators.
Long persecuted as perceived threats to livestock and humans, hunted
for their skins and purported medicinal values, and losing critical
habitat to deforestation and conversion for agriculture, big cat
populations have dwindled around the world for the past century.
Recent years have seen the extinction of two sub-species of
Indonesian tiger, the Caspian Tiger from western Central Asia, a
sub-species of clouded leopard from Taiwan, and the Barbary lion
from the wild in North Africa. Meanwhile, populations of the Iberian
lynx, Asiatic cheetah and Amur leopard have fallen so low that they
would be functionally extinct without current conservation efforts.
Tiger populations have declined from more than 100,000 at the turn
of the century to less than 6,000 today, while cheetah number are
estimated at less than 15,000. Even lion populations have dropped:
from over 100,000 one hundred years ago to probably less than 40,000
Given these trends, it should come as no surprise that big cats have
become the focus of conservation efforts. Not only are large
predators often the most vulnerable to human pressures and the first
to disappear from ecosystems, but efforts to conserve them
effectively help protect thousands of other species that share their
At the forefront of these efforts in Dr. Luke Hunter, a biologist
with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) where he heads their
Great Cats Program. While he has worked in Africa since 1992, in the
past year Hunter has tracked highly endangered Asiatic cheetah in
Iran and jaguars in the Brazilian Pantanal and is part of an effort
to develop a comprehensive plan to conserve the snow leopard
throughout its range. Hunter believes that understanding the
biological needs of these species -- through careful research that
sometimes includes tagging and remote monitoring of animals -- is
the first step in saving them. Alongside that, he strongly advocates
collaboration between conservationists and local people to minimize
predation of livestock (often overstated) and activities that
threaten predator populations.
In a May 2007 interview with mongabay.com, Hunter discussed
strategies for conserving carnivores and offered insight for
students interested in pursuing careers in conservation science.
Rhett A Butler (Mongabay):
How did you become interested in wildlife and specifically big cats?
Even under ideal
settings, predators invariably take the occasional cow or goat.
Given this, what's the best way to minimize the impact of predators
on livestock? How do you encourage local people to not take up arms
against opportunistic predators?
Dr. Luke Hunter: I was drawn to animals and wildlife from a
young age. My parents say that I latched onto wild cats when I was
three years old and the interest never waned. I am still fascinated
by big cats but professionally they interest me now because of the
conservation issues surrounding them. All big cats have undergone
major declines in numbers and loss of range, which in some cases,
has left them seriously imperiled. Lions, tigers, jaguars and
numerous other cat species are now "conservation-dependent," meaning
that their persistence in large contiguous populations is now
directly connected to targeted conservation action. If we simply
stopped those activities, we would certainly lose some key
populations; in a handful of critical cases such as the Iberian
lynx, Asiatic cheetah and Amur leopard, we could lose the entire
Importantly, conserving wild cats is not simply about the
preservation of a handful of individuals for their own sake. Like
many large carnivores, big cats require large, relatively wild areas
with healthy prey populations. So to protect a viable population of
big cats, one has to conserve the entire ecosystem on which the cats
rely. It means that cats are very effective tools for conserving
biodiversity; setting aside an area large enough to secure a
population of tigers or snow leopards also secures the thousands or
tens of thousands of species that also live there- everything from
the snow leopard’s ungulate prey to invertebrates in the soil, to
the many plant species that both consume.
2. It seems there aren't too many big carnivores left in your native
Australia. Have you done much work there? Where do the bulk of your
studies take place?
Hunter: I grew up in one of the few countries on earth with
no indigenous placental carnivores! We have the dingo which was
brought across by people from south-east Asia some 3500-4000 years
ago but otherwise, Australia has never had any native species of
cats, dogs, bears and so on (‘native cats’ or more correctly,
quolls, are marsupials not closely related to the placental
carnivores). I’ve never done any of my own field research in
Australia. I left when I was 23 to go to South Africa to begin my
MSc on lions and cheetahs, a stint that was supposed to last 2
years. My masters grew to become my doctorate which I followed with
a post-doc, so I ended up staying in South Africa for nearly 8
years. I still have a one project in South Africa, a long term study
of leopard population dynamics under different levels of threats
from people, which is now led by a very talented South African PhD
student of mine, Guy Balme.
Hunter: I think the key lies in reducing peoples’
problems—real and perceived—with carnivores. I say ‘real and
perceived’ because carnivores are rarely responsible for the
majority of losses experienced by livestock owners. In fact, where
really good data are available, it’s very revealing that carnivores
are often quite far down the list of factors that cause losses.
Other causes such as disease, starvation or even where livestock
simply goes missing are often far more damaging but
people—especially poor, rural people—accept these things as ‘acts of
God’ or perhaps just the cost of doing business. However, they often
feel that they can address the carnivore threat because it’s fairly
easy to pick up a gun and go shoot one!
So, we attack the problem from all sides. Demonstrating to people
that carnivores may not be their greatest problem is the first step
but that might not help much unless you can address the other
factors; so for example, helping local people with their veterinary
needs for livestock might be a very good way to reduce overall
losses so that they don’t feel the losses to carnivores so keenly.
As well as that approach, we now have more tools and techniques than
ever to mitigate the damage that carnivores do cause. In many, many
cases (not all), a simple change in husbandry approaches can have a
dramatic effect. Perhaps all a herder needs to do is bring in or
guard his cattle when they are calving, so that the opportunities
for carnivores to kill vulnerable calves are reduced. Or maybe he
can switch from herding dogs (which traditionally chase livestock
when a threat appears, in turn provoking a chase from the predator)
to large, livestock guarding dogs that have been used for centuries
in places like Turkey and Iran, which chase the threat rather than
the herd. We try to work with local people to help them adopt
techniques like these, often by providing or helping to provide the
materials, training and even covering the costs.
Big cats also
face threats from poachers. What's the best way to control illegal
Looking at legal
activities, can trophy hunting play a role in conservation?
Hunter: There are two main ways that illegal hunting impacts
cats. The first is the targeted killing of cats, usually for their
parts because they are valued in some way. This is especially
profound in much of Asia where traditional medicinal beliefs drive a
demand for bones and other parts of tigers (and other cats). The
second major impact of hunting comes when the prey species of cats
are hunted for the pot. You can have perfectly good, essentially
intact habitat which is useless for big cats because the prey
species have been hunted out by people for their own consumption.
Controlling both types of illegal hunting first requires strong
enforcement of laws. It isn’t very fashionable these days to promote
the idea that local people should be prevented from hunting or
consuming wildlife products because doing so may have their origins
in traditional practices, but there are some species and some places
that should be off-limits. Strong laws and the national and
international capacity to enforce them are absolutely essential to
ensure the persistence of protected areas and protected species. In
the case of hunting for subsistence (not for cats, but for their
prey species), providing alternatives might be the answer. If local
people are relying on the forest for their protein, introducing some
limited farming of small stock like pigs and chickens might help
(combined with strong efforts to make sure they are not vulnerable
to predation, which would create another problem!). And finally
education is important. Millions of people consume wildlife products
because of their purported medicinal value, the great majority of
which have no scientific or medical basis. Convincing people of that
is a huge challenge.
Hunter: In principle, trophy hunting can play a significant
role. In parts of east and southern Africa where I’m most familiar
with hunting, large hunting concessions can contribute to keeping
wild areas wild. If not for the revenue generated by hunting, many
of those areas could be viewed by governments for activities that
would be far more destructive to wildlife and biodiversity, for
example, for livestock, agriculture and so on. ‘Non-consumptive’
wildlife tourism is not an option at many of these places because
they are undeveloped, too remote, have malaria present and so on.
Hunters tend to be more tolerant of these things than the average
Having said that, I think trophy hunting of big cats is managed very
poorly in many places. Quotas are often assigned on the basis of
very little information or very poor science. Take leopard hunting
as an example. Leopard quotas are still most often justified using a
badly flawed model produced in 1988 that related rainfall to
productivity; essentially, the model predicted that high rainfall
areas could support the greatest biomass (including of leopard prey)
and therefore, the most leopards. It was a reasonable idea but its
execution was very simplistic and it produced impossible
over-estimates of leopard numbers. Despite being widely and
continually criticized by carnivore biologists and wildlife
managers, it is still used by governments today to establish harvest
Lion hunting is also problematic. There are now very good data
available showing that the impacts of shooting male lions has ripple
effects throughout the larger population, a result chiefly of
accelerating the natural turnover rate of pride males and therefore,
of infanticide—the killing of unrelated cubs when new males take
over a pride. Both Craig Packer’s team working with his long-term
dataset from the Serengeti, and David Macdonald and Andy Loveridge
working in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park have produced very strong
arguments for either reducing hunting quotas or limiting the age of
males which can legally be shot.
I am not opposed to trophy hunting but I feel strongly that it must
be based on good science and it must be sustainable. With few
exceptions, that rarely happens in the case of hunting large cats.
Why is it
important to trap and tag wild animals for conservation work?
How to you reduce
the risk of injury to wild animals when they are trapped or darted?
Is a woozy animal more vulnerable to predation itself when
recovering from capture?
Hunter: Doing effective conservation relies on very strong
science, and in many cases, the only way to collect the necessary
data is to catch animals and fit them with radio-transmitters. Let
me give you an example. My team and I recently succeeded in
capturing Asiatic cheetahs in Iran for radio-collaring. There are
only about 60-100 Asiatic cheetahs remaining in the world, all of
them in Iran, and we know very little about them. The collars will
help us answer some key questions about their behavior and ecology;
the size of areas that Iranian cheetahs require for their home
ranges, the routes they take to travel between existing protected
areas, the key features in the landscape on which they depend- for
example, as den sites for females- and so on.
These questions are more than merely academic, because without the
answers, we cannot plan a meaningful conservation strategy that
gives the cheetahs the greatest chance of survival. In the absence
of such information, the resulting activities or actions are often
those which have the least resistance towards them; for example, the
places that become parks are those areas which are politically least
problematic to protect—the areas that no-one else wants or uses.
But, if as I suspect, the conservation of the cheetah in Iran hinges
on protecting certain landscapes that are also sought after by
people, for example, to graze livestock, to convert to agriculture,
to put in the next highway and so on, we need to be able to
demonstrate with strong science how that will impact the cheetahs.
The collars will help to provide those answers.
Equally, it is just as important to ask the question, does
conservation of the species require radio-tagging? There are many,
many cases where it does not. I often read proposals by graduate
students who are wishing to radio-collar cats to address a
conservation issue when they could far better achieve their goal by
some other means. If the main threat to a lion population living in
an African game reserve is being killed by local pastoralists
outside the reserve, I’d argue you don’t need to collar a bunch of
lions to address the problem. The most immediate priority is more
likely to involve working with that community to find out why they
kill lions and if there are ways to reduce it. Assuming you already
know enough about lions and the reasons for the conflict,
radio-collars won’t help.
Hunter: Trapping or darting animals
their vulnerability, so it is critical to reduce that as much as
possible. The great bulk of biologists I’ve met are very concerned
about this and take great care in reducing the risk. So for example,
we use ‘recovery cages’ for animals coming out of sedation—that is,
placing the animal inside a wooden box crate to protect it from
danger, and only releasing when it has fully recovered. Also,
depending on the species, there are now some anesthetics with
effective antagonists that reverse the anesthesia. This is common
with ungulates but not with carnivores- newer drugs are proving
hopeful for many species. Even without these antagonists, the most
important thing we do is remaining with the animal until it is fully
recovered. Typically, we move off a short distance to watch the
recovery with binoculars without the animal getting agitated by our
presence but remaining close enough to intervene if a threat
Having said all this, it is important to note that capture-related
accidents of the kind you describe are rare. It can take weeks of
effort just to catch one carnivore; the chances that another turns
up while your critter is recovering is fairly low.
Do you have any
notable close-calls working with big cats?
Do you have any
advice for students who are interested in pursing wildlife
Hunter: Not really. I was once ‘bitten’ on the thigh by a
lion as he woke up from sedation but he was still very groggy. If
you’ve ever had anaesthesia, you can probably imagine what that was
like—it was like being mauled by a sponge. He left a few bruises.
Hunter: Apart from taking all the appropriate classes in
school and university, I think one of the best things students can
do is volunteer their time on conservation or research projects. The
biology departments at local universities are often excellent places
for making contacts with graduate students who need help with their
field work. Check out their notice-boards or even better, post your
own notice offering to help with field projects. Grad students
probably won’t be able to pay anything but they usually cover costs
(food etc) and more importantly, it is a fantastic way to gain field
experience. And at the same time, it tests you. Field work is often
boring, frustrating, dirty, physically demanding etc etc, not at all
the glamorous occupation that people often think—so it allows you to
decide if it’s really for you. And if it is, then having the
experience counts for a lot in eventually securing your own place in
a graduate program; potential advisors take note of students who
have already gone to the trouble of gaining field experience off
their own bat. There are also some good online resources for
opportunities like this; one of the best is the
Conservation Biology’s job pages.
How can people at
home help protect big cats and other endangered carnivores?
Hunter: Of course one of the most important needs is for
funding; there are many good conservation organizations working to
save carnivores and all of them rely on donations. A great deal of
conservation could never happen without that support—make a donation
if you can. Visiting wild areas also helps; whether it’s a once in a
lifetime trip to the Serengeti or a stay in Florida’s Everglades
National Park, tourism helps to subsidize the perpetuation and
protection of many wild areas. Finally, getting involved politically
is tremendously important. Protecting wild areas and wildlife is
often politically unpopular because it goes against the interests of
powerful, wealthy interest groups, so making a stand is where every
individual’s voice really counts. Right now, on WCS’s webpage, you
sign onto a petition asking Congress to pass an appropriation bill
to fund the conservation of endangered carnivores.