Introducing The Last Lions, and the Authors Behind this Incredible Book.

There are great stories of good and bad management of lions throughout Africa, the point of this book is to highlight the good. Read the book: there are lot of good news stories, in Chad and South Sudan, for example. Each chapter in this book is written by a different expert author, telling their own story, from their perspective. With Lions in particular, South Africa, is bipolar. We are the best and the worst at lion management. The good is that we have re-wilded close on a million hectares of land. The bad is that it all needs to be managed, because there are no connections between the islands of land and there are no corridors for the animals to commute.

“When I started in tourism in 1977, there were rhinos everywhere, it was easy to find a crash of rhinos on tour. We started to see the decline, instead of seeing a big crash, we would see two or three rhinos, which were a bit skittish. And then there was a day in 1986, where I saw not one rhino.” It was at that point that we realised what an environment is without a key species. A guest would say, “We’ve seen all the lions, leopards, why aren’t there any rhinos?” And then I would have to tell them that rhinos were now extinct.


The biggest problem we have is that while we have good examples of natural wildlife, we also have the canned lion breeding industry. At one stage, we had 12,000 lions in cages in South Africa. I guess the biggest single thing, this whole issue is that there are certain blocks in Southern Africa which are very much pro-utilisation of a species. And under the guise that we’re gonna go use the body parts of an endangered species to save the species. The proceeds will go to conservation. But economics has proven time and time again you can never supply enough for the market. These folks make a huge amount of money out of trading the body parts of endangered species.

It’s a whole money spinning racket. It’s marketed as sustainable, but once a lion has been in close contact with human beings, you can never re-wild it. There is no conservation value, for breeding wildlife in captivity. We have this whole industry, it a massive industry, where a few people, make a huge amount of money. They try and testify that they are using wildlife sustainably. But the ultimate game is to try and make money out of every single phase:

• The First Step in the Money Chain: Is to get volunteers from overseas, to come to South Africa and volunteer to save lions. Each volunteer pays something like $1,000 a day, to save lions, these facilities, are making something like a million rand a month, just from volunteers. The volunteers are charged with a lion cub, they have to feed them with bottles, and care for them.
• The Second Step in the Money Chain: Inviting tourists to pet the baby lions for a fee. When the cubs get too big for petting, they invite tourists to walk with lions. Tourists are prepared to pay a lot of money for the experience.
• The Third Step in the Money Chain: When the lions are too big to walk with they become bait for trophy hunters. Thousands of lions have been born and raised specifically to be hunted. The argument is that they are protecting wild lions from being hunted… thousands of lions raised to be hunted.
• The Fourth and Final Step in the Money Chain: After the shooting tragedy, they get to make more money from selling the pelt and bones. This all under the banner of “sustainably using the animal”

As soon as the cubs are born, the females fall pregnant and the “Sustainable Cycle” begins again.


The best part obviously, getting it out. One problem was finding the balance between the harsh realities of the lion story, and the positive conservation successes. First of all, getting the publishers to want to do it is huge. Once we got it together and we’d done the design, we handed it over, they put their team of fine tuners onto it and they were very good. And then the Smithsonian sent their fact checkers. The problem is, is that a scientist makes a claim, and the fact checker might have used AI to find the answer. And then there would be this clash between what the scientist, on the ground said, and what somebody in the State’s said. And you now you have to mediate between the two. You have to be sure that every single fact is indeed a fact, and not just an opinion.

Remember we both have normal lives, and we write our books on the side. So a lot of my work happened late at night, pushing into the night. 


I run a safari/conservation business. Mostly conservation, but we always need funding, so we created a tourism business that does conservation.

The idea of the book is that we raise awareness, through the story, through the photographs and through sharing it on. The hours and hours we spent working on it can never be repaid, and we will never recoup our costs. This is a labour of love. Our book is not raising funds at all, it is actually our contribution to life, to society. The reality is that we are facing a lion extinction, it will happen rapidly overnight, and we need to do something about it urgently. 


It is actually my 16th book, but part of a broader series of large, collaborative conservation books. Our previous book on The Last Elephants came about when Colin and I got together over a coffee at a conference where a large survey on the status of elephants was presented, we were shocked at the results and the narrative to catch with the results, so that they could share the science with a much greater audience. The Last Lions project follows in the tradition: big, complex, and purpose-driven, bringing the story behind the science to life, using good journalism and excellent photography.

Once we had finished the great work of our Elephant book we had decided again… but the statistics spoke to us: we heard that there were only about 24,000 lions left in the wild. That number was alarming and we felt a responsibility to act. We began contacting lion specialists all over Africa.

We needed the shock factor, we estimated that the elephant population crashed from 3 million to 450,000… but the lion has population dropped to 24,000. We are on track for extinction. And the public need to be aware of that, this book is their cry for help.

Particularly in South Africa, our major game parks are doing well and they are reporting conservation success stories, but the infrastructure behind the smaller provincial parks has collapsed, not to mention poaching leaving islands of lions. the problem with the distinct islands of lions is that there is no genetic flow. In times gone by, there were natural corridors between lion prides and they were free to roam. In order for lions to continue to thrive, we would need to create corridors for them… and that would be expensive.

We gathered together scientist, eco-tourism guides, all sorts of specialists. And then hassled them to write their stories, persisting with them and rewriting. It is an interesting process, some of the contributors take two weeks to return an article and others take two years, and all of them would rather be out in the field, getting their work done. There is a lot of to- and fro-ing between contributors and the writers. We also wanted to create a book that had the same feel as the ElephantXXXXX and chose our design accordingly. I did most of the writing and editing of the documents submitted by experts and Colin gathered photographs from top photographers, where ever there were lions.

Our contributors are field researchers, and would rather be doing their own work, they don’t naturally like to sit at computers, and often don’t have the necessary technology required. We are living in a critical time, when scientists need to communicate their research with people at large. As the editor, I had two goals with this book: One was to be completely clear, in the writing, so that anybody could pick it up, so tidying up the science all the way and the second thing is to make sure that anybody, any layman, would find it readable. 
That meant taking out a lot of numbers, people get stuck on numbers. I am lousy at numbers and assume that most of our readers are too. Replacing equations with words for easier reading and generally turning the science into a narrative.

It’s when it lands on your desk. They send you a box all wrapped up, and you cut the straps off, and you take the paper, the tape off, and there’s the book. It’s just very exciting. Because then, you know, then you’ve got a product, an item. You’ve got something to share. Until then, it’s all been inside a computer, it’s in the air, it’s inside the space. To have a real book is still a good thing. It feels good. Nice. And, you know, what’s also nice, when people get back to you, and say it really changed the way they thought.

I’m very disciplined. I write fast because I’m a journalist. I don’t write on a whim, I write to a deadline. There is a time of day when I start writing, and I stop writing at 12 o’clock. That’s it. Nothing creative after 12 o’clock. So I have to be very disciplined, because I write a lot. I mean, this book was done while I did my day job of writing as a job, I wrote it on the side. It’s a lot!



I’d be a biologist. I did the wrong degree, in a way. I’ve got a PhD in political science. And I’ve got a masters in criminology. There’s a certain point in my life when I discovered that all I had studies was one species, humans. It is a shock. I was actually doing a wilderness leadership trail and I woke up one morning and went, “I know nothing about what’s around me. Nothing. I know, I know it’s here, I can see it, but I know nothing.” So, I actually transitioned. I was working for getaway at the time. I convinced the editor that I could write an environmental column, knowing nothing about the environment. I forced myself, once a month, to study hugely in some topic of the environment. And wrote a column for 300,000 intelligent readers.

My heroes are biologists. They are these amazing people that have an innate knowledge of what’s around them. It’s more than knowledge. It’s entrancement. Endorsement with the world. 
That is what’s the quality of a good scientist, but particularly in the biological field. They’re not just interested, they’re not just knowledgable. They trust. It’s beyond a natural curiosity, it’s deeper than that. What I found when I was writing is that it’s so easy to talk to them, because I just get them going on their subjects, then hold the recorder, and they just go. I don’t have to do any work. You don’t have to push. And they are so amazed that somebody who’s not in their field is interested in their fields. They’re the easiest people to talk to, because they’re entranced.