Saving Lions: How I’m Protecting Wildlife in My Homeland | Nat Geo Live

THANDIWE MWEETWA: Our beautiful wilderness is in trouble. It's being hammered on all sides by human encroachment, poaching, and habitat degradation. And our mission is to save these large cats, wild dogs, and all these other species in our beautiful ecosystem. (applause) Zambia's Luangwa Valley is indeed one of Africa's best kept secrets. This environment is so awesome that it is one of the last remaining strongholds for lions on the African continent. I have been very fortunate to live in this beautiful environment surrounded by wildlife, and living here, I've been able to see animals live in action. Previously, I only used to see them on a tiny black and white TV, but I was fascinated even then.

My uncle works as a safari guide, and he always came home with wonderful stories of animals that he met during his work, and those just fascinated me. They encouraged me to join my secondary school conservation club so I could learn more about these species. I found many fascinating things about the animals in this place, but also really sad news. Our ecosystem was under threat from, you know, common things that are affecting many other places in the world. Human encroachment, poaching, habitat destruction, you name them. And so I decided there and then to say, "I'm going to do something about it." I decided to become a wildlife vet, so I could help treat and cure animals that had survived bullet wounds from poachers.

And so I studied really hard. I would stand at night, really late at night with my feet in a bucket of cold water, so I could make the grades to get into university. (laughing) And that did work. I was very lucky. I got admitted into the pre-vet program at UBC in Canada, ready to go take on this challenge to become a wildlife vet.

But you know, it didn't go down well. Second year into the program, I discovered I could not handle cutting anything with a sharp knife. -(laughing)- And so my dream for vet school crashed and burned right there. It was so sad. I had spent so many sleepless nights studying to do this. But it did not end there. I got diverted into a different career path where I could still help these animals. I currently work as a wildlife biologist with the Zambian Carnivore Programme, and our mission is to save these large cats, wild dogs, my absolute favorite, and all these other species in our beautiful ecosystem through applied research and community-based conservation.

So my job is one of the best on the planet. I get to see and touch animals that I had only seen in books and magazines before. And it's an amazing experience. I get to collect key data on survival on who's going where, who's eating what, and what sort of areas they're using in our beautiful ecosystem.

A typical day begins with me and my partner in crime, Gibson Banda. It's not crime-crime because Gibson is a wildlife police officer with the Department of Wildlife and National Parks in Zambia. And he is a great person to work with. He is a comedian so we are laughing all the time. He is a wonderful human GPS. He knows the system like the back of his hand and this is an area the size of Yellowstone National Park. So, it's great. We get carried away sometimes. We're out for days. We ran out of water and we had to share waterholes and drinking points with hippos, -elephants. -(laughing)* Sometimes we get to some really bad places. You know, we get stuck and getting back on the road can take anything between 15 minutes, 24 hours sometimes. The best we've hoped for is an entire afternoon. But it works out. We're able to get around.

And so this difficult task if you call it is compensated by even more beautiful pictures like this one. Our absolute favorite to see out in the field is a male strawberry blonde lion, called Ginger. He's not ginger-ginger, he's more strawberry blonde, but Strawberry is not a good name for a male lion. (laughing) So, Ginger has a brother called Garlic. Um, Garlic is a regular lion. We are always happy to see Garlic. Um, he's a lion. -What's not good...- (laughing) What's not good about that? Anyway, all of these wonderful scenes, all of these amazing experiences in the field lead to the sad reality that we have to live with.

Animals are being affected by the poaching crisis fueled by the illegal Bushmeat Trade. These are not the targeted species for the Bushmeat Trade. We do not eat lions. We don't eat wild dogs. But people are going for deer-sized antelope that they can sell to urban areas and all those places. The methods that they use are non-selective, so that means animals, anything that is of this shoulder height, this shoulder height, can get in and get caught. And the impacts are catastrophic as you can see. Animals die, animals lose their legs, and that is just pretty sad. But we work really hard to save as many animals as we can and working really closely with people that are in the park all the time helps us do what we do.

And these animals, I'm happy to say, made a complete recovery. Animals do recover even from injuries that are as gruesome as that. Just going to share one story about a particularly favorite lion of mine who we call Funny Ear. -It's a very un...- (laughing) It's a very unimaginative name for a really beautiful lioness. But Funny Ear was a young lioness when I first started with the Zambian Carnivore Programme. She was about a year and a half. She stands out because of her ear, but Funny Ear in 2010, she picked up a snare in her travels with her pride. And it was pretty sad, but luckily the people that spotted her and they reported to us and we're able to go there, take off this snare, and she healed remarkably well.

And so her story kinda ends in a beautiful Disney-style, -you know, Disney-style ending.- (laughing) She got her prince, and well, a couple of princes because she is a lioness in her prime. -(laughing)- Really beautiful. And in 2015, we saw Funny Ear raise her first litter of cubs. Really amazing, a graduation ceremony of some sorts, so gives us hope to keep on pushing and keep on working. And so we've heard all about getting people to care and every society, every culture has a saying that goes in the line, "Children are the future." And we take that to heart in our work and we really try to work really hard with these communities and these students to just get them to become environmentally conscious lawyers, teachers, nurses, and conservation leaders of the next generation.

We take students out in the field and expose them to wildlife in their natural habitat. And it's just an amazing experience. And these kids love being out in the field. They don't want the field work to stop. So, it gives us hope to see that they're ready to learn and they're willing to go the extra mile. And along with this conservation education work, we want to impart skills that will empower them going forward. So, it's skills like public speaking, writing, computers, that can be taken for granted in the developed world and in our cities. These students will have the chance to get an, sort of, equal footing almost with regards to uni admission, getting employment, anything other than poaching.

And so last year with generous support from the Big Cat Initiative, we are able to do a human-wildlife conflict study focused entirely on understanding people's interactions to big cats and also other carnivores. It was a nice opportunity for students to get in the villages, talk to people, share their conservation message, but also we've found happily that there's not as much conflict as we thought in our part of the world, but there was a lot of negative perceptions about big cats in general. We need to get people to care about these issues. And it comes from us, all of us that are here, talking to them about experiences that we've had with these animals.

Alice Deal Middle School right here in D.C., they did a podcast on what it means to them to conserve lions. And I'm going to quote what one of the students said. She said, "We need to give big cats and large predators a chance. We are their only predator. They cannot survive without our help." Thank you. (applause)