In a sobering op-ed in The Washington Post, National Geographic explorer-in-residence Dereck Joubert writes that lions are rapidly disappearing from Africa due to poaching, and might be extinct by 2020. In the last 50 years, the lion population went from half a million to less than 23,000. The population has decreased 50 percent in just the last 20 years, and things are only getting worse. Lions are not protected from poachers in the same way elephants are, so it's still legal to kill a lion—and poachers have gotten very good at it. They have begun using a deadly, fast-acting pesticide on lions’ food, allowing them to kill the cats in minutes. As the tiger population also decreases—there are fewer than 3,000 tigers left in the world—lion bones are providing a solution for entrepreneurs who previously depended on selling tiger bones for cures and medicines, since lion bones can pass for tiger bones. Without action, lions risk extinction by 2020, warns Joubert. Joubert is crusading for participation in the Big Cat Initiative, a conservation project that seeks to return the lion population to “sustainable levels” by 2015. “The biggest threat isn't hunters, poachers or poison makers—it is our own complacency, the lazy hope that someone else is taking care of the great beasts of Africa.”
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