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Dr Amy Dickman’s guest blog on complex conservation challenges

Amy Dickman’s guest post in Scienceplusstories explains her emotional commitment to conservation, highlighting the complexities facing wildlife and people and her first-hand experience of finding lion and other wildlife conflict-related killings.

Science + Celebrities: A Call for Partnership

This guest post is by Dr. Amy Dickman, a conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer who directs the Ruaha Carnivore Project (and is also joint CEO of Lion Landscapes, a Kenya-based independent non-profit conservation research org that increases the capacity of local partners to secure viable populations of lions. Amy wrote this gracious and moving essay in response to my recent post taking her and other scientists to task for not engaging more with UK celebrities who have supported campaigns critical of trophy hunting in Africa, despite that activity’s demonstrated benefits for wildlife conservation. I’m honored to publish it here, and ask that you share it with your networks. –Bob Lalasz

“I have spent more nights in my tent crying over lion deaths than I wish to count. Given my lifelong passion for this incredible wild cat, each death cuts me to the core, but some stand out more than others. The lioness whose hind legs were cut off, and whose swollen teats suggested she had only recently given birth – I spent days agonising about what was happening to those newborn cubs, almost certainly starving to death where she had carefully hidden them. Three other tiny lion cubs, speared and piled up in the bush with a wooden stake through their fragile bodies. A young lion, perhaps only two or three years old, whose ravaged paw showed the agony of hours in a wire snare before it died from multiple spear wounds.

Read the full article here.