Luke Hunter, President and Chief Conservation Officer for Panthera, a wild cat conservation organization
Nature’s extraordinary resilience fills me with hope.
I learned this during my first hands-on experience with big cats, 25 years ago as a doctoral student in South Africa. As the country emerged from its apartheid-era isolation, I started a project to reintroduce cheetahs and lions to areas of their historic range. Great swathes of former ranchlands were rehabilitated, replacing old fences, corrals and cattle with zebras, wildebeest, rhinos and elephants. Once prey populations were replenished, we released the big cats. And they blossomed.
I watched entire ecosystems return to the wild, as reintroduced cats established territories, found mates and raised their cubs — the first generation born to areas that had lost their kind decades earlier. Today, over 50 of these newly created populations collectively protect many hundreds of wild cats where there had once been cows.
The South African project succeeded, in part, because of massive investment in dollars and technical expertise, but cats and their ecosystems can bounce back naturally, if circumstances allow. European colonization of North America drove the mountain lion largely into the remote refugia of the Rockies. As urbanization and growing tolerance has created space for predators, mountain lions are gradually pushing back east, on their own. Similarly, the nations of Western Europe had destroyed all but tiny remnants of their native forest and its wildlife until political stability and a strict conservation ethic emerged after World War II. Recovering lynxes, bears and wolves now live in and around some of Europe’s most densely populated urban areas.
Sadly, there are populations of big cats and their habitats around the world for which such a recovery is probably too late. But for many others, all they need is a reprieve. If we can back off the human pressure — especially the hunting of prey and the relentless persecution of the cats themselves — they will do the rest. All we have to do is give them that chance.