Why did I start Lion Landscapes?

Large carnivores are difficult for people to live with. Let’s face it, most of them are large enough to consider any one of us, our pets, or our livestock as dinner. Many people have their lives and livelihoods threatened by carnivores on a daily basis. As a rule, posing a threat to human beings is not a good recipe for long-term survival on this planet. And so we (those of us that don’t want to be the largest carnivore around) need to tackle two overarching challenges:

1) we need to make sure people that share the landscape with large carnivores are willing to continue to do so, and 2) we need to make it practically and financially feasible for them to do it.

This is what our small and dedicated team at Lion Landscapes aim to support but we cannot do it alone. We are lucky enough to have a large number of brilliant partners, from rural livestock owners to nerdy technicians. It takes a village to raise a child, and it will take a planet to save a species. That includes you, there are lots of ways you can help too, watch this space and we will tell you how.

I have a confession to make, lions are my first large carnivore love and we are a little lion centric here at Lion Landscapes. The name of the organisation might give this away but in our defence, lions are a great flagship species for all the large carnivores; the fact they are so big and live in groups makes them arguably the hardest of all the large carnivores for people to share the landscape with. If people can share their space with wild lions, then they can live with any carnivore species. Lions are also disappearing at a rate that means if we don’t do something now, and something big, we will lose them.