There’s reason in lion shootings

It is easy for those sitting in the comparative comfort and safety of a big city to criticise the Mpumalanga farmers who shot the lions who escaped from the Kruger National Park.

We can say they should have called the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency on to their farm on the Crocodile River Conservancy – and then waited until the experts captured the animals.

That position has validity. However, the reality is that the three lions which escaped were a lot closer to the farm homestead than either the farmers or the nature conservation people believed.

And they had already killed a cow. Lions are deadly creatures and, had they been allowed to range further afield, they could have killed more livestock or, worse, attacked humans – most of whom would not have had rifles, like the farmers, to protect themselves.

Sadly, too, once predators like these have tasted “easy” kills like cattle, they become much more prone to trying to escape to kill again.

And that’s when they become a possible fatal danger to domestic animals and humans.

The world has forever been changed by humankind’s fences and there will also be conflicts like this when human habitation and agriculture abuts a wild area.