Outrage as lion that killed woman as she made love to boyfriend is shot
Conservationists have reacted in outrage to the shooting of a wild lioness
and her two cubs in northwestern Zimbabwe after they killed two local people
last week.
By Peta Thornycroft in Harare and Aislinn Laing in Johannesburg 5:30PM GMT
10 Mar 2013
Sharai Mawere, 43, a market stall owner, was making love to her boyfriend at
a secluded spot in the bush near the northern town of Kariba when the
lioness struck on Tuesday.
Her lover escaped and alerted armed rangers who fired shots to scare the
animal away, but it was too late for Miss Mawere. She died at the scene.
Later that day, the head and pelvis of Mashunjeni Jakiel, 77, were found
near a suburb of Lake Kariba town. He had been missing since the weekend.
With fears growing that the lions had acquired a taste for human flesh and
would kill again, vets in Harare said they should be darted and moved to a
wildlife sanctuary.
Instead, they were shot by wardens from the Department of Parks and Wildlife
Authority and a professional hunter.
Johnny Rodriques from the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force said the female
lioness had a wound from a snare around her neck, and had only started
attacking humans because poachers had decimated stocks of other animals
around Zimbabwe’s vast Lake Kariba.
He said the three lions looking for food in an arid area close to a town was
“an accident waiting to happen”.
“The lioness was wounded, there was no food for her to eat so she and her
cubs were a danger, and we should have been able to dart them and transfer
them across the dam to a protected area,” he said.
“We have applied to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species (Cites) for Zimbabwe’s lions to be declared an endangered species,”
Mr Rodriques said. “Zimbabwe is now very short of lions.”
According to the Born Free Foundation, Africa now has fewer than 25,000
lions, compared to 200,000 lions 50 years ago.
Conservationists writing in last week’s Ecology Letters journal said that
wild lions are killed because they are perceived to be a threat to
livestock, and competition for land and over-hunting of their prey have
reduced their numbers even further. They say that moving them in to
fenced-in nature reserves could be their only hope of survival.
Dr Luke Hunter, from the big cat conservation organisation Panthera, said:
“No one wants to resort to putting any more fences around Africa’s
marvellous wild areas, but without massive and immediate increases in the
commitment to lion conservation, we may have little choice.”
Cavan Warran, for the Kariba Animal Welfare Trust which helped arrange the
lions’ shooting, said they wanted to dart and move them but the urgency of
the problem gave them no time. “These lions had tasted human flesh and after
consulting widely we concluded that they had to be euthanised immediately,”
he said.
Mr Waran said he was just over 100 yards away from the lions when they were
killed.
“We discussed darting and relocation after the first victim but when the
second victim’s remains were found the vets all said they should be
destroyed,” he said.
“If there was a zoo or a very controlled facility in Zimbabwe or resources
and we had a day or two then perhaps we could have arranged an alternative.”
A Zimbabwean professional hunter who knows the area well told The Daily
Telegraph that poaching was “out of control”.
“There is a lack of skills and a shocking lack of resources,” the hunter,
who asked not to be named, said.