Asiatic Lion - Data, Pictures & Videos

[Rishi]

@chaos You (& many others) shouldn't have had such opinion in the first place. 
It is based on a flawed view cooked up by who-knows-who, circulating in the internet that the numbers fell as low as a dozen, which is preposterously baseless!!!

Let me present an excerpt from 2015 lion census report gujenvis.nic.in/pdf/lion-population-estimation-report:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Considering the fact that they first started recieving protection only from the last decade of 19th Century, no possible conservation scenario could have pulled their numbers back up, from that to 285 (even if that value is probably highly exaggerated, but say, 150-200 by considering the handfull of salt) by 1936. Just not enough time!

The population likely never fell below 100, definitely not below 50.

Actually the first proper census was done in 1968, after Gir was declared a Wildlife Sanctuary in 1965. 

So, some amount of inbreeding has definitely happened, but not as alarming as uninformed people make it out to be...
The specimens in the zoos are definitely below par though, (Good info found by @Betty here #182), because they are almost invariably made up of orphans, rejected or abandoned by their mothers.
This is how we obtain them.

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