BREEDING AFRICAN LIONS

The late Jimmy Chipperfield , who started Britain's first safari park at Longleat, was one of the first to address this problem. At a meeting in my office in 1979 he informed those present, ' Castrating the adult males is no use; the manes fall out and they look awful with their huge heads. Vasectomy of the males or surgical neutering of the females is better, but expensive and traumatic.

Since then, of course, we have had the arrival of the contraceptive implant -a hormone pill, painlessly inserted in the neck region just under the skin of the females, which suppresses ovulation. When the contraceptive implant became widely available in the mid-1980s, and as it was described as " reversible ", it was perceived as the answer to a prayer by hard-pressed zoo curators world-wide.

By the mid-1990s, vets and others were cheerfully inserting fixed-life implants designed to suppress reproduction in the female for short or longer terms.

Anyone familiar with the technique in domestic cats was not listened to.
The effects in some , female domestic cats are unpredictable. Some females take an abnormal time to resume cycling; some never do. So it has turned out with exotic species, particularly tigers. Attempts to restart some female Siberian tigers who have carried an implant for several years have proved unsuccessful, with significant consequences to the population planning of this highly endangered sub-species.

We tried a very short-life (i.e. six months) implant on our female lion, Jemima , and saw, with painful clarity, how long it took her to start cycling again - over twelve months. Obviously, we are not in the business of mass-producing African lion cubs. Nevertheless, we feel confident of placing two or three cubs now and then without too much difficulty. Accordingly, Monty and Jemima had been left to get on with it.

For zoophiles, cat lovers and big cat lovers, our lion family represented a fascinating and absorbing opportunity to study their ' domestic ' behaviour in a spacious, relaxed, stress-free and unhurried setting. As this is not freely available these days - even in a safari park, where you feel you have to drive on quite quickly - most of us are seized this chance with avidity.

The striking affection of Monty and Jemima for each other and Monty's good-natured tolerance ( was it more? - hard to be sure! ) of his cubs, as they clambered all over him biting at his mane and jaws, was thought-provoking in the extreme.

When Glasgow Zoo first opened in 1947, some of its first animal inhabitants were African Lions - not that many people differentiated too much between African and Asiatic lions back then. In any case Asiatic lions weren't available in the U.K. at least. Since then we have never been without them, with some like the late Ranger, living to the ripe old age of 22.

Last week, this unbroken line almost came to an abrupt halt. On Tuesday 16th March, 1999 Monty and Jemima , the breeding adults, were discovered collapsed and nearly completely paralysed.

Monty was in the house, Jemima in the outside enclosure Nearby, one of the two male cubs born in April 1998 lay upright, paralysed from the pelvis down.

Despite the earnest endeavours of our vets, Jemima was dead by Wednesday morning, Monty by Thursday afternoon. The cub, who showed no improvement at all, although he could just manage initially to pull himself around a little, was put-down on veterinary advice on Sunday afternoon, 21ST March 1999.

The adults were found comatose. Both had staring, dilated pupils and could just snarl and wrinkle their lips. Monty was immobile, whilst Jemima's limbs twitched as she appeared to be trying to get up. The young cub couldn't move but snarled apprehensively, if you spoke to him.

The first reaction of most Zoopark people is to think they had been poisoned, and indeed we haven't completely ruled this out. However, other zoos, and nearby Edinburgh Zoo in particular have lost adult lions on two occasions over the past twenty years, from barbiturate poisoning, so this seemed the most plausible avenue to investigate.

Our vets informed us that within the last month, a recommendation had been received from M.A.F.F. that casualty cattle over the age of 30 months be destroyed by lethal barbiturate injection if at all possible rather than by bolt gun which posed a theoretical risk of infection for the vet of the B.S.E. agent through sprayed blood and other fluids. Whilst appreciating the necessity for this measure - about eight years late some might feel - it is also immediately obvious that this poses a greater responsibility than ever before on our meat suppliers to take great care to avoid the site of these injections, or better still not send us any in the first place. It has to be said that they have usually been extremely careful. If the meat is found to be at fault, this will be the first problem of this nature in over thirty years, the last fifteen of which have been with the present supplier. Because of advice received some years ago now, we have always fed cow-meat.

Post-mortems at Glasgow University's Veterinary School, showed two animals in very good condition. Because the previous day had been a fast day, their stomachs were empty. We were puzzled as to why Jemima , whilst comatose on Tuesday morning, still managed to expel three faeces of normal shape, size and consistency, especially as the digestive process of lions is extremely rapid.

Examination of the bones found in the enclosure has been undertaken at the Vet School.

No abnormalities or reasons for death could be determined at all.

Samples of tissues and organs were taken for further analysis, but the staff are not hopeful of isolating anything of significance.

In accordance with our long-standing protocol - ten years at least - the brains were removed to check for signs of F.S.E. - Initial examination showed none.
Botulism - symptoms not typical, and Salmonella
Poisoning have been ruled out. So what caused these deaths, and why the two adult lions in particular. We shall have to wait and hope that the coming week sheds more light on this distressing incident which has reduced some of our Friends and volunteers to tears.