African Wildlife Environment Issue 75 FINAL

GENERAL

David Macdonald, Director of WildCRU, University of Oxford, UK. As human populations in Africa and India continue to surge into the 21st Century, placing ever increasing demands on land and resources, the future of the world's lions hangs in the balance. To meet the challenge of conserving these magnificent but demanding creatures in the wild, we need to grasp the complex history and nature of this issue, meticulously researched and comprehensively presented in this important book. - Michael 't Sas-Rolfes, Oxford Martin Fellow, Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, University of Oxford, UK. This not a picture book with pretty pictures of big cats. It is a serious scientific work that will be compulsory reading for anyone really interested in the history of lions and their interactions with humans. As the latter expand inexorably into the territories of wild African animals, the big questions is: how and why might lions survive and even thrive in Africa, when they have been wiped out of their former ranges in Europe and Asia?

He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, UK. I can do no better than reproduce some media reviews from various top experts: Professor Somerville has written the definitive history of the relationship between lions and humans. This meticulously and exhaustively researched book starts sixty million years ago with the evolutionary origin of Carnivores and ends with developments in lion conservation in late 2018. In between, it examines the long history of conflict between the two apex predators, documenting in agonizing detail the lion's long spiral toward extinction at the hands of man, and the current efforts of a handful of conservationists to reverse the decline. This will be the standard reference on lion conservation for years to come. - Laurence G. Frank, Living With Lions Project Director and research associate in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, USA. Keith Somerville eruditely rips the scales from his readers eyes to unveil the interacting blights that have beset lions for millennia – trade, conflict, hunting – pills all bitterly coated in the proliferation of people. Where does that leave lions? In a precarious mess.

ADVENTURE A WORLD OF in our own backyard

7 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 75 (2020)