Scared Straight? How Chasing Lions Away Could Help Protect Them
By Caden Williams
Have you ever had to shoo your cat away from stealing your food? Imagine having to shoo away a lion from stealing your livestock! This is a daily problem for communities living near Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. Both scientists and locals hope that nonviolent solutions like scaring lions away from hanging out near human settlements will become an effective part of coexisting with predators.
What’s the issue?
Male lions are responsible for the majority of livestock kills. So, it’s sad but perhaps unsurprising that almost 90% of male lion deaths are caused by humans. In addition to habitat loss, lions are threatened by farmers trying to protect their food source and way of life. Unfortunately, lions are most often killed after becoming “problem animals” — that’s when they turn into neighborhood regulars and repeatedly attack livestock. The Long Shields Community Guardians Program is trying to find other solutions. One of their approaches is literally chasing lions away from households and back into the national park. But how exactly do you get a huge carnivore to go where you want it to? By blowing a horn at it, of course!
Who ya gonna call?
Long Shields Community Guardians Program trains locals to manage lions when they come into contact with people. One of the ways they do so is by guardians getting texts whenever a lion with a GPS collar comes close (~2 km) to households! Like real-life superheroes, they’re on the case as soon as that message comes through. Guardians arrive on the scene and try to herd the lions away from people and back towards the park. They chase the lions by playing loud horns called vuvuzelas and following them until they’re safely in the park boundary. But does this “hazing” really work? Lisanne Petracca from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and her team did a study on these lions to find out.
Hoping for cowardly lions
From 2005 to 2016, Petracca’s team tracked 16 lions living in the study area that included most of the Hwange National Park and the surrounding community lands. In 2012, the Guardians program began. 5 of these lions had been recorded as coming close to local households at least once before the program started. These were considered “at-risk” lions because they were more likely to get into conflict with livestock than the other group: 11 “protected” lions, who hadn’t ventured much outside protected areas in the past.
Researchers wanted to see if lions would change their behavior after being hazed. Hopefully, they would learn to steer clear of trouble with humans and start spending more time away from where they knew they would be chased. But the researchers also thought about other possible ways the lions could react. Would they learn to be sneakier while still approaching livestock? Researchers also watched movement patterns to see if hazed lions would hide in vegetation or become more active at night, when guardians wouldn’t chase them.
Does it work?
Surprisingly, hazing didn’t cause the lions to change the way they used vegetation, nor did they become more nocturnal. In fact, some lions actually became more active near households during the day. But does this mean that the hazing was ineffective?
Well, one group of at-risk lions did show a significant shift in their home range after hazing. Male lions that were hazed chose to hang out in the park three times more than the other groups of lions, and this increase was also associated with a decrease in using community lands. Spending more time in the national park, and less time near settlements, is a good sign that lions can learn to avoid people if we bother them enough.
However, as any parent knows, changing behavior requires both firmness and consistency. If lions aren’t scared off consistently enough when they approach human settlements, or if they think going after livestock is worth the trouble, they can still become problem animals. It’s also best to start young. The hazing was seen to be most successful with young, inexperienced lions, who hadn’t yet established their territory or preferred food sources.
The future of lions and humans
Because they’re long-lived animals with complex social behavior, it’s hard to find methods that work for all lions. The small number of individuals studied also doesn’t paint a complete picture of how other lions will react, or how different environments affect lion behavior. Still, this study’s findings represent a small ray of hope for nonviolent solutions to avoiding predator conflicts with people.
Overall, the ongoing Long Shields Community Guardians Program has been able to successfully reduce both livestock and lions killed. Working tirelessly since 2012 to combine community education, increased livestock protection, and lion tracking, it’s been no easy feat. As we learn more about lion behavior, we can learn how to better coexist with these iconic predators. Petracca and her team’s research on the program is helping to show that if people can change, lions can too.
Work Cited:
Petracca, LS, Frair, JL, Bastille-Rousseau, G, Macdonald, DW, Loveridge, AJ. Harassment-induced changes in lion space use as a conflict mitigation tool. Conservation Science and Practice. 2021; 3:e373. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.373
