Tragic Poisoning of Lion Cubs in Uganda, a Filmmaker Reflects | National Geographic

[Music] Hours, they're filming the incredible tree climbing behavior of these lions. They're getting bigger, they're getting stronger, and every day means that they're closer to survival. Lions occasionally climb trees all over Africa, but the two main areas where they climb trees are here in Queen Elizabeth National Park and also in Lake Manyara in Tanzania.

They're all climbing, and they climbed these big candelabra trees and these big fig trees. So the news was really sort of devastating. We didn't realize as to how much danger these cats actually were in that village nearby. The pot, I got off the phone, I got an SMS, and then I—yeah, I mean, I was very emotional. I cried, but it's a ranger that spends more time than anybody, a guy called Jimmy Kiss Ember, who spends hours every single day driving around the study area, telling the tourists where the lions are, and he knew them so intimately, more intimately than we did.

But it was, it was a devastating blow to everyone just because they were the main pride that everyone was looking at and loved so much. [Music] They were poisoned because they were eating livestock, and the people that had the livestock didn't have any money. These people are making a couple of dollars a day, and you can understand that if one or two cows is all that your family has, you'd probably also poison those lions because they're your entire livelihood, they're your entire existence.

So it's something that's just really unfortunate. There is no villain in this story. You know, if it was some rich hunter or some rich person that did this, yes, that would be bad, but this is something that just points to a much bigger problem facing lion conservation across Africa. You [Music]