How a New Generation Is Saving Zambia's Lions | National Geographic

There's no sound in the wild that is as amazing as they rolled a lion in Zambia. We had so many stories about them growing up, how just hearing them roll can bring down an entire manhood. I was young; I used to be out of stories about Laila's, how they eat people. Other stories were about how they just wanted to kill for the sake of it.

But when I grew up, I found out that that was not true. When I was 13, I got involved with my school's conservation Cub, and that's where I got to learn about the different issues affecting wildlife. I, myself, Antonia, where we all were in the conservation Club, and that changed our minds. You just see the world in a different way.

We are having an impact on these species, saying they're gentle, and it's up to us to do something about it. So then, that's when he decided to pursue a career in the wildlife side. A group of lions that we heard were in the area, when we locate them, we want to pass this information on to the lion anti-snaring team so that they can come to the area, check it for snares, and prevent any lions from getting caught.

Lions in Zambia, they're being threatened by human-related impacts, and so populations have been declining in some places. Lions are locally extinct. There's a whole lot of problems in our communities. Poverty, for example, leads people to go out and set lioness in the bush. The snares that I used are non-selective, so lions can walk into those snares and get trapped. The animal can choke to death or get an infected wound.

If we can't find them today, the consequences are pretty serious because this area is usually used by poachers as well for push mix. I will keep listening for a while and try to get a location. It's difficult to, you know, act responsibly when you haven't eaten. I think that's the most difficult thing. We need to find a way of balancing human needs as well as our natural environment.

If we, the local people, are directly involved in conservation, it could be a very big success because we know the area, we know what sort of resources are there, we know what to eat, and we know what we don't eat. So we could try by all means to find another way of doing things. Just before we cross over and go into the park, I'm just going—one of the things we do is take students into the park.

We teach the students how to collect scientific data and how to use different pieces of equipment that help that. For you to get the location, you hate mud; it's pretty fun for them. We also want to impart practical skills that these students can use later on career-wise. It opens up new possibilities. It's important to introduce them to our life early and just show them these species in a more different light.

Then they become more compassionate and responsible when it comes to the interactions that they have with these animals. This because I get to know some of the new animals like that—the war dogs, and some of them, you are the first time to see them like that.

The hope is that many of them should have a high forward life. It is our responsibility as ambience to take charge and protect these animals, to see what life is a renewable resource. If we preserve them nicely, we are going to have them indefinitely. Like she's having a sweet little lap in the sand, makes me really, really happy to find this lion alive and healthy.

She would have died without intervention from said CP in cooperation with Conservation South Wang Hua and the Department of National Park. The work that I'm doing with my colleagues is creating a generation of people that are working towards the protection of these species. We are the people that live with these species, and we are responsible for making sure that we survive side by side.