by Larry Smith
Maggie Crouch, Julian Jakusz and Bonny Byfield are longtime Nassau residents who have operated a volunteer animal rescue and neutering service here for the past 20-plus years dubbed the Pink Potcake. Along the way, they have enjoyed several African safari tours, and last month they were in Cape Town to take part in a march organised by the Campaign Against Canned Hunting.
“This cruel practice is where lions are bred in captivity and then released into an enclosed area where they are shot like sitting ducks by wealthy trophy hunters,” Crouch told me. "We have been on many safaris and have been absolutely thrilled by all our wildlife sightings, so we were proud to have done our little bit of payback for one of the most fabulous animals of the African bush."
The lion is one of the world’s most charismatic animal species. They once roamed the whole of Africa, Europe and Asia, but their numbers and range today have been vastly reduced by hunting and development. Asiatic lions have been on the endangered list since 1970, and survive only as a remnant population of a few hundred in a single small area of India.
Some 30,000 African lions survive, down from perhaps 200,000 as recently as the 1970s and restricted to about 17 per cent of their historical range. But large populations (of 50 to 100 lion prides) are necessary to avoid inbreeding, which increases significantly when populations fall below 10 prides. These conditions are met in few wild lion populations today, experts say.