As Tigers Become Rarer, Poachers Are Targeting Lions

LIMPOPO NATIONAL PARK, MOZAMBIQUE The four young lions died where they ate their final meal. They were found lying on sandy ground near the remains of a poisoned calf. No one witnessed the silent slaughter—only the gruesome aftermath. When park staff investigated the killings, they found that the faces and paws of all four cats had been hacked off.

"It’s not a nice thing to see,” says Marius Steyl understatedly. Steyl, the law enforcement operations manager at Limpopo National Park, in Mozambique, was a member of the team that investigated the killings in late January. “It’s the king of the jungle, and suddenly it’s just being wiped out by humans.”

According to Steyl, two men are suspected of the crime, likely killing the lions in retaliation for the cats having preyed on cattle. One man has been charged, and the other remains at large.

In Mozambique, and widely in Africa where lions are found, the continent’s most recognized predator is facing a growing threat. As tigers in Asia have become scarcer in the wild (fewer than 4,000 are estimated to remain), other big cats around the world are being targeted for their parts: leopards, jaguars—and now African lions.

Conservation groups in East and southern Africa say that during the past three years, increasing numbers of lions have been killed and mutilated for their claws and teeth, likely to satisfy demand in China and Southeast Asia, where the parts appear to mainly be used as pendants and amulets.

“There’s just a growing awareness of the availability of lions parts in Africa and their potential to stand in as tiger parts,” says Kristin Nowell, director of Cat Action Treasury, a U.S.-based organization devoted to the conservation of big cats in their natural habitats around the world. Nowell is also the coordinator of the “red list” for big cats with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which determines the conservation status of species.

“We’re quite concerned about the lion,” says Nowell, who contributed to the most recent IUCN assessment of African lions, in 2016, which listed them as “vulnerable.”

Across Africa wild lion populations have plunged by about 43 percent since 1993 to no more than 20,000 in 2014, according to the IUCN. Habitat loss and the reduction of lions’ wild prey by the bush meat trade are forcing them into dangerous contact with humans and their livestock. Cats that prey on cattle become the targets of retaliatory killings. And now, increasingly, poaching for lions’ body parts is compounding these problems.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which regulates the global wildlife trade, prohibits commercial trade in the parts of wild African lions. But South Africa, which has thousands of captive-bred lions, can legally export their parts—up to 800 lion skeletons a year. According to CITES, most go to Laos and Vietnam, where the bones are used as a substitute for tiger bone wine, considered a status symbol and used for treating various ailments and giving the drinker the “strength of a tiger.”

CITES also notes that during the past five years about 150 lion claws and teeth have been exported from South Africa to China and Vietnam. That number is the tip of the iceberg of trade between Africa and Asia, with the volume of illegal claws and teeth seized from Asian nationals during the same period exceeding those traded legally.

According to Nowell and others, South Africa’s legal trade is stoking Asian demand for lion parts as stand-ins for tiger parts and is fueling a growing illegal trade in the teeth and claws of wild lions, further reducing their numbers.

“AN OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE MONEY”

The IUCN’s 2016 lion assessment raised concerns that “wild lion parts from eastern and southern Africa could be drawn into the large illegal wildlife trade to Asia centered around elephant ivory.” The fears are now being realized.

In Mozambique in June 2017, a Chinese national was arrested at Maputo International Airport with lion teeth and claws, as well as items made with ivory. And in Senegal last August, lion teeth were seized as part of the biggest ivory haul in the country’s history. Then, in November, 19 lion teeth and 51 claws were discovered in South Africa in a package containing a rhino horn bound for Nigeria.

According to Nowell, the spike in wild lions being poached for their claws and teeth corresponds with a growth in other poached African wildlife being trafficked to Asia. “It’s not surprising that lions were sucked into that,” she says of the convergence with ivory and rhino horn. Like ivory, lion claws and teeth are valuable to all those involved in the trade: poor villagers supplementing their meager earnings by poaching, the middlemen who have connections to the top traders, and the sellers in Asia.

“If you’re in that trade, whether you’re selling ivory, rhino horn, body parts of lions, it’s the same markets, same ways of getting it out of the country, which the different levels of people involved know,” says Peter Leitner, Limpopo National Park’s project officer with the Peace Parks Foundation, a nonprofit group that helps establish transfrontier conservation areas. “It’s an opportunity to make money. So it’s more product. There is no doubt the same people are being used.”

What’s happening in Limpopo serves as a sobering case study. During the past three years poachers have taken claws and teeth from 20 of the park’s lions, reducing the known population by 15 percent, prompting fears that the cats could be wiped out in some areas.

According to Nowell, one reason poachers increasingly seem to be killing lions for their claws and teeth, rather than their skins or bones, is practical. “That could be quite a process, to butcher and extract the bones—quite heavy to carry off a full lion carcass—so a quick getaway might be part of it. Also, the teeth and claws are easier to smuggle.”

At present, according to the park’s Marius Steyl, the biggest poaching threat to lions in Limpopo is from organized criminals who snare lions’ prey animals and poison their carcasses to kill the cats. Monitoring what’s happening in the park, he says, is difficult. “The criminal has always got the advantage, in the sense that we don’t know where he is. We’ve got a big park—it’s 1.1 million hectares, so it’s a big area to cover.”

But Limpopo is fighting back.

At a remote camp on a warm April morning, 40 new recruits were being trained, most of whom would join the park’s field staff. In a mock takedown, recruits were slinking through the savanna carrying automatic weapons before pouncing on a poacher and arresting him. A handful of the recruits will join a special anti-poaching team dedicated to protecting lions.

“We’d like to get [there] before the lion gets killed,” Leitner says. To that end the team is being trained to follow the spoor of lions, look for poachers’ footprints, and remove snares and poisoned carcasses before lions feed on them.

The park is also bolstering its materiel, adding a new helicopter and vehicles, and has introduced a system of paying informants when successful arrests are made. “So we’re trying to fight this battle through information, and that’s the most efficient way of doing it,” Leitner says.

TIGER—OR LION?

According to Nowell, confiscations and NGO research shows that some sellers are passing off lion teeth and claws as tiger parts.

Unless you’re a big cat expert, knowing what’s actually on offer is anyone’s guess: What’s sold as tiger could be lion. And if the lion teeth on display are in fact just that, there’s no telling whether they’re from wild lions (and therefore illegal) or captive-bred lions from South Africa.

On sale at a sprawling antique and crafts market south of Beijing’s city center are pendants made with bear and wolf teeth, hair pieces out of pangolin scales, and at half-a-dozen stalls, purported tiger canines—decorated in silver, or engraved, or in their natural state—and claws.

“You just drill a hole through the bottom of the teeth and wear it as a necklace,” said a man, speaking on condition of anonymity. He was selling two brownish teeth for 1,600 yuan (about $250), which he claimed were from Bangladeshi tigers. “It will keep you safe,” he said.

At another stall, a young woman was selling what she advertised as tiger claws for up to about $65, depending on their size. “Use a black string, tie it up, hang it on yourself, and wear it like a necklace,” she said. (She too refused to give her name.) These things, she explained, represent the vigor and strength of the tiger. “Wearing them will protect you and keep you safe.” Because tigers are critically endangered, all such items are illegal, but the woman said that buyers who live outside China can put them in a box and claim it contains arts and crafts.

These days much trade in wildlife products is conducted online. On Taobao, a Chinese online shopping site that’s a subsidiary of Alibaba, I found lion teeth pendants on offer. One was selling for $126.

At no other time has Africa’s king of beasts been so threatened. Conservationists are urging more vigorous law enforcement to tackle the illegal trade in their parts and are pressing for a ban on the legal trade. “Lions are in trouble,” Nowell says. “There’s a fear that this trade problem could escalate and really get out of hand, like it did for the tiger.”


calf 小牛
gruesome 令人毛骨悚然的
aftermath （战争，灾害等之后的）状态
paw （有爪动物的）脚
hack off 砍掉
enforcement 执行
suspect 怀疑
retaliation 报复
charge 告发，指控
at large （犯人）在逃
leopard 美洲豹
jaguar 美洲虎
mutilate 切断手脚
pendant 项链坠儿
amulet 护身符
stand in 代替
assessment 评估
plunge 突降，俯冲
bush meat 打猎得来的野生动物的肉
livestock 家畜
retaliatory 报复的
poach 偷猎
convention 会议
substitute 代替品
ailment 慢性病
seize 逮住
stoke 拨旺火
fuel 刺激
haul 大批赃物
rhino 犀牛
spike 皮下注射
meager 贫困的，贫乏的
transfrontier 跨国界的
sobering 清醒的
practical 实用的
butcher 屠宰
carcass 残骸
smuggle 偷运
snare 捕捉
slink 悄悄的走
pounc 突击
spoor 足迹，臭迹
snare 陷阱
bolster 支持，援助

confiscation 没收
breed bred bred 养育，饲育
pendant 首饰
pangolin 穿山甲
purport 声称
engrave 雕刻
on condition 以。。。为条件
anonymity 匿名者
brownish 呈褐色的
vigor 精力，活力
subsidiary 附属事物，子公司
vigorous 有精力的，强壮的
tackle 着手处理
escalate 逐步升级

He Collected 12,000 Road Maps—Now We’re Discovering Their Secrets

Robert Berlo got hooked on maps at an early age. As a kid growing up in San Francisco he’d pore over roadmaps in the backseat of the car on family vacations. Sometime around age 11 he started collecting them.

By the time Berlo died in 2012 at 71 he’d amassed more than 12,000 roadmaps and atlases. But he did more than covet and collect them. Over the decades, Berlo spent countless hours mining his maps for data, creating tables, charts, graphs, and still more maps on everything from transportation systems to the population history of small towns. Now, Berlo’s collection is getting another life as a repository of previously hidden information.

“He was always the keeper of the knowledge,” says Berlo’s son Mark. When Mark was a boy, Berlo would plan out the best route for family trips and figure out the best places to stop for gas or get a bite to eat along the way. As an adult, while on trips with his wife and two sons, Berlo would type up index cards listing every town they’d pass along their route.

Berlo loved to take road trips, and he favored back roads to interstates, says his wife, Juanita. “He always had a set of maps in the car,” she says. “He could read them while driving and fold them back up while driving.”

When they weren’t traveling, the Berlos lived in Livermore, California. Robert worked nearby in the technical information department at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, first as an editor and later as deputy department head, putting his undergraduate degree in chemistry from MIT to work. “He was an extremely brilliant man,” Juanita says.

In the evenings after dinner, when other people might turn on the TV and mentally check out, Berlo would turn on classical music, sit at his desk, and work on his maps, often late into the night.

Juanita still lives in the couple’s mid-century house in Livermore. When I visited recently, she brought out a large envelope of her husband's maps and notes. Inside were neatly stacked timetables for MUNI, the bus and streetcar system for San Francisco, dating back several decades. There were sheets of MUNI route information torn from phone books and other sources, as if he’d been checking the official time tables against other listings. There were also many, many notes, both handwritten and typed, and a letter from a MUNI employee—apparently in response to a query from Berlo—describing how he could access historical information about routes and service.

Juanita also showed me several maps of imaginary places Berlo had drawn. One showed a city along the shores of Mono Lake in eastern California. Another, which covered the top of a small table when we spread it out, depicted a sprawling metropolis along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Both had been drawn by hand on vellum in remarkable detail. The intricate street grids included neatly written names (some borrowed from Berlo's native San Francisco) and one-way traffic symbols. There were railroad lines, parks, creeks, and other features.

Mark Berlo thinks his dad drew these maps mostly for fun, like playing a paper and pencil version of the city-building video game Sim City in the days before video games. “When he drew a city, he drew it so it would function,” Mark says.

Berlo donated his map collection to Stanford University in 2011. The university also has several books he wrote and published himself. One of them, contained in a thick blue three-ring binder, sits somewhat incongruously on a shelf of cloth-bound books and atlases in the main library. The spine lists the title in large print: Population History of California Places. Inside are hundreds of pages of tables detailing the known populations of California towns and cities dating back as far as 1769, when the first Spanish mission was established in San Diego. The book, Berlo writes in the preface, is attempt to recreate the population history of every settled place that ever existed in the state of California.

Berlo wrote the book hoping to fill gaps in the population data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. Before 2000, he writes, the Census didn’t count people living in smaller unincorporated places—that is, places without legally defined boundaries. Berlo tracked down population estimates listed in unofficial sources, including his vast collection of roadmaps and atlases. In total, the book contains population data on 5,500 California cities, towns, and other settlements, only 500 of which were ever incorporated.

Based on the preface, the work appears to be “an exemplary amateur history conducted in a very professional manner,” says Jon Christensen, an environmental historian at the University of California, Los Angeles. The accuracy of Berlo’s population estimates depends largely on the accuracy of his sources, Christensen says, but he adds that Berlo seems to have done an exceptionally careful job of documenting his sources and leaving a trail that amateur or professional historians could follow.

Meanwhile, Stanford political scientist Clayton Nall has been using Berlo’s map collection to study the politics behind the development of the U.S. highway system and to investigate how the expansion of highways may have contributed to the urban-rural divide in American politics. A team of research assistants has so far spent about 3,000 hours digitizing Berlo’s Rand McNally road maps, which go back to 1926. Once the maps are digitized and processed, they can be used for statistical analysis—to look, for example, at whether more miles of highway were built in counties that had more representatives in their state legislature, or whether urban areas with more extensive highway systems saw more white flight in the second half of the 20th century.

The statistical nature of Nall’s project probably would have appealed to Berlo. Many collectors collect maps because they find them beautiful or relish having a rare edition of an historical map. Not Berlo.

Mark Berlo occasionally tagged along with his dad to events for map collectors, and he says there was a big difference between his dad’s mindset and everyone else’s. “He wasn’t there for the maps,” he says. “He was there for the statistical information that was on the maps.”

A few collectors were appalled by Berlo’s practice of stamping a blue serial number on every map he collected, Mark says. But the important thing to him was keeping track of all his maps in a computer database.

All in all, Mark says he thinks his dad did all this because he wanted to make a difference in the world, and because gathering information was one of the things he did best. “I don’t think there was any grand master theory he was working on,” he says. “He just wanted to collate the information and put it out there in a format people could use.”

get hooked on 上瘾
pore over 熟读，专研
amass 蓄积
atlas 地图集
covet 贪求
repository 宝库
back road　小道
deputy 副的
mentally 精神上
neatly 整洁地
stack 推起来
tear  tore(過去形) torn(過去分詞) 撕
query 询问
imaginary 虚构的
spread out 铺开
vellum 牛皮纸
intricate 复杂的
creek 小河
binder 装订
incongruously 不调和地
spine 书脊
mission 传教团体
Census Bureau 人口普查局
unincorporated 未组成社团的
exemplary 示范的
accuracy 正确性
digitize 电子化
legislature 议会
relish 引起兴趣的东西
mindset 思考方式
appall 使惊骇
serial 连续的，定期的
collate 校对