ગીરની ભૂમિમાં પ્રથમ વખત આંતરરાષ્ટ્રીય સિંહ સંરક્ષણ સેમિનારનું આયોજન કરવામાં આવ્યું હતું, જેમાં વન્યજીવ સંવર્ધન અને સિંહ સંશોધન સાથે જોડાયેલા વૈજ્ઞાનિકોએ ભાગ લીધો હતો.
00:00My name is Dr. Paul Funston. I'm a lion conservation scientist from Africa.
00:05I'm extremely happy to be here in Gia today to celebrate the way that the Indian government and the Pro Service and the people of India have protected the lion here in Gia.
00:15It was nearly extinct now. We have almost 900 lions. It's a problem of overabundance.
00:21In Africa, our problem is generally underabundance.
00:24Lion populations are killed by people. Their persecution levels are very intense.
00:30There are lots of people now who want to poach lions for their body parts, to kill the animals that the lions eat on for prey.
00:36People are converting the habitat the lions live into fields for agriculture.
00:42We have almost no tolerance for lions in Africa.
00:47It's very difficult for lions to live in the landscape alongside people.
00:51In India, your religion, your culture, your government, your way of thinking is different.
00:57And although the lions were very few before, they are many now.
01:00We need to take these examples from India, the lessons that you've learned, the mindset, the love.
01:07This whole today is about the love of lions, the love that people have had for lions.
01:13And that has worked, it's translated into a lion population that is many here.
01:18We need to take those ideas to Africa.
01:22Well, we need to celebrate what's happened, the successes.
01:26But then we also need to pause and think, well, what's next?
01:29The gear lions only live in the Gujarat state.
01:32Do we perhaps want lions in other parts of India one day?
01:35I know this is a politically quite difficult question for the Indian people to think about.
01:40Because ultimately, you want the lions to be represented across as much of their range as possible.
01:47The parts of Africa, West Africa now, has got almost no lions left.
01:51There's just two national parks in the whole of West Africa that have got lions.
01:55They're going extinct in many of the other countries.
01:59And so how do we put lions back?
02:02How do we shift lions to new parts of India?
02:05How do we take lions and we put them back into parts of Africa where they're missing?
02:10These are important questions.
02:12We're dealing with many, many lions here in the Gujarat state.
02:15That's an issue of overabundance.
02:17Could we use those lions in other places to make sure that we have lions across a bigger area?
02:23How do we do that?
02:24What is our thinking process around rehabilitation?
02:28These are important sort of questions that are specifically pertinent to our discussions and our thoughts here in the Gujarat.
02:36First, generally, I think that a disease is a symptom of overabundance.
02:41So most of our work in Africa, we don't actually focus too much on disease.
02:46We learned some time ago already that disease is often a bit of sort of overemphasized as a risk.
02:53Yes, when you have populations that are at superabundance in a local area, that is when diseases tend to kick in and start to affect populations.
03:02But if you're dealing with populations that are below, in terms of their abundance, well below their carrying capacity, disease is very seldom an issue.
03:10So in our lion work in Africa, disease is generally not a big issue.
03:14But it could be in local populations where there's very intense numbers of lions.
03:19How do you protect lions?
03:20You have to have very good park service.
03:23You have to have very good patrolling and law enforcement.
03:26That's where it starts.
03:27You have to have a specific area that needs to be defined as a sanctuary.
03:33And you have to have the resources to protect that area.
03:36So that's the step number one.
03:37Then you need to engage with the people outside.
03:40How are their lives affected by lions?
03:42How can we make their life living next to lions as safe as possible so that their livestock don't get killed,
03:49so that they don't get killed?
03:51So it's a two-pronged approach.
03:53It's about working to secure and protect, stop people killing the animals illegally,
03:58and then at the same time making sure that the lions are not too dangerous for the people whose lives they interlink with.
04:06So that's it.
04:07So that's the point, gosh.
04:08So that's the point.
04:08So that's the point.
04:09So let's know that their animals are completely different.
04:10So that's why the lions are not so dangerous.
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