A lioness leaves her injured cub after a buffalo attack | The Last Lions, 2011
Derek Joubert director of The Last Lions on why he didn’t intervene with the injured lion cub.
"A few people have written to us regarding the lion cub with the broken back from our film ‘The Last Lions’, and expressed feelings of distress that we, as filmmakers, didn’t intervene. We understand these feelings and I want to take this opportunity to put that scene into context and explain why we chose to let nature run its course.
The cub had a broken back. There is quite simply nothing to be done for an animal with a broken back sadly. We had two options: to watch and film nature (in its infinite wisdom) play out something that it has been doing, in the context of lions, for 3.5 million years quite successfully... or to step in and...what? Kill the cub. Yes, that was our only other option and I will explain why in a moment. We stopped carrying weapons in the bush in Africa twenty-five years ago because we do not believe in harming animals just to defend ourselves. I feel that usually, if you have a gun, you will find reasons to use it. We find we are more aware of our actions and better at avoidance, if we are not armed.
In this case, shooting the cub would have been an option, although even that would be problematic. Firstly we have developed a trust with this mother lion over seven years. Shooting her cub would have been emotionally destructive and we would have lost her trust. Killing the cub is considered highly illegal in Botswana, an offense that would put us in jail for poaching, and certainly would have made the government withdraw all of our future permits for research and filming, which would disallow us from doing any more films that could help save big cats in the future.
Also, in the absence of a rifle, we would have had to kill the cub by hand. As you can imagine approaching an injured lion cub with its mother nearby would not only be dangerous, but also extremely stressful for the cub. Ethically, I could not find myself adding a massive stress spike to the cub's last hours and feel it was right.
However, if we do believe in its perfection, we must also accept some of its harshness. Not every lion cub born can survive, or we would have prides of enormous sizes. A pride of lions will have about eight females and each will have four cubs every two years for ten years. That would result in prides of over 100 lions, if we saved each one and it stayed with its family. The issue is that when we add hunting, poaching and trade on top of natural selection, we over-tax populations.
Even if our analysis on the day was wrong, and the cub could have survived with care, (I know it could not have) the nearest vet is 75 miles away and can only be flown in to our island. He would have had to apply to the government to get permission to dart and treat the cub, which as I suggested earlier, would not have been granted.
Even if it was granted, the cub had already been rejected by its mother and would have been committed to a zoo. This entire process would have taken a few days, which by the way, is more than the cub lasted. We don't have a zoo in Botswana and so we would have had to find a zoo in South Africa to accept the cub. I can almost guarantee not one zoo would do so, simply because a two-month old cub alone will not survive. Now I do not like or believe in zoos as holding pens for animals and see them as jails for orphans, so as we sat with the cub struggling on, Beverly close to tears, we weighed all this up carefully and decided with heavy hearts to take our lead from the wise mother of the cub. She understood that her cub was not going to live. We needed to understand that as well and we followed her away.
It has long been our policy not to interfere with nature. If for example, we come across a snared or gun shot animal, we will spare no expense to rectify what Man has inflicted. However, we believe what nature herself does can only be witnessed and understood and not interfered with. Books have been written on this and the ethics of wildlife filmmaking.
One last question remained and it was whether to share this heartbreaking scene with the world. We nearly did not. But we have always been honest with our audience and trust them with knowledge. Africa is not Disneyworld and people who want to understand life and enrich their world want to see a real version of what goes on. Only once we are armed with a realistic view of that world can we be a part of finding solutions to the crisis I see we are in. With regards to wildlife and wild places, we believe our interest should be in saving the species in the wild, not trying to play God with Nature and injured cubs with no chance of survival.
Caring with knowledge of how to be effective is the greatest weapon we have and we hope that ‘The Last Lions’ will continue to galvanize people to take action and help us. A world without lions will be a very sad one."