Asiatic Lion Reintroduction Project

[GuateGojira]

Here is an interesting statement: "so if lions were a later introduction (post 1700) so they were just left to roam freely? Harper's record shows lions were found in entire central India , Lions were found in most parts of Rajasthan especialy southrn Rajasthan suggesting they entered Gujarat from Rajasthan, this could also mean lion entered India from Pakistan. I also read of lion's existence in southern Bihar (now Jharkhand)."

The answer: No lion survived in "tiger land", NO ONE, only in Gir, a place which don't even have lion fossils (Divyabhanusinh, 2005), and had a heavy African influence in they culture (watch the documentary "The last lions from India" from the series "Natural world" from the BBC). Captain Thomas Williamson, the author of the epic book about India’s animals, Oriental Field Sports, says that in the 1780s, while pig-sticking, one was likely to encounter tigers that had strayed into the open, but never lions, or for that matter, cheetahs. In his observations of the same period, Thomas Pennant says of lions: ‘Those who deny that those animals were natives of India, assert that here was a royal menagerie and that the breed was propagated from the beasts which had escaped.’ The debate about the origins and prevalence of lions and cheetahs in India must have been vigorous in the eighteenth century and later but it is intriguing the fact that it hasn’t been talked about much in recent years. In his book, Wild Animals in Central India, published in 1931, A. A. Dunbar Brander writes that there were no lions in Central India too. Why are pictures of lions as hunting trophies so rare and the few that exist tend to have been taken after 1886 in Gir?

Those lions hunted in Central India were single introductions for the sake of the hunt. You most remember that the bags of lions were never over 10 in India in a year, while those for tigers and leopards were of hundreds.
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