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T.B. LIONS

They're the biggest of cats - kings of the African jungle - how cruel then to be felled by that most prosaic of European diseases, TB. Bovine Tuberculosis is now sweeping the plains of South Africa's Kruger national park, having spilled over from neighbouring farms. Domestic cattle infected the wild buffalo, the buffalo infected the magnificent beasts who prey on them for food. Now three quarters of some prides in Kruger are showing symptoms of TB. And experts are warning of catastrophe if the disease spreads to the rest of the continent. Africa correspondent Sally Sara on the fight to save the lion.

Africa's Kruger national park montage

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Sara: It’s one of the largest animal kingdoms left in the world.

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Sara: The Kruger national park in South Africa, rich with life after the rain. A timeless, mystical place stocked with nature’s most beautiful species.

Lions

But one rises above the rest. Kruger is ruled by the lion.

But, now the lions are falling prey to an insidious enemy.

A killer disease is infecting the once majestic prides.

Keet

Keet: The moment you see a lame animal, with lacklustre skin and one blind eye, limping along and they’ve got sores that cannot heal, it’s a pathetic looking animal.

Tourists in Kruger national park

Sara: Kruger national park covers more than two million hectares. It’s one of the most important lion sanctuaries in the world. The park draws in more than six thousand tourists every day. And it’s the lions, which are the prime attraction.

Lions

But these lions, healthy as they look, have the prospect of an early and painful death.

An interloper from Europe, a killer which has the potential to drastically alter the ecological balance, is sweeping the park.

Lions in treatment

Tuberculosis is seeping into the food chain. And right at the top of that chain is the lion.

Keet

Keet: He's in bad condition. I'd say two out of five…

Sara: Dr Dewald Keet is dealing with the distressing debris of the TB outbreak.

Keet: …in fact you can see the kidney here.

Sara: He’s spent the past 13 years in the park as the chief state veterinarian. He was the first to diagnose the disease in free ranging lions.

Keet

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Dr. Dewald Keet

Chief vet. Kruger National Park

Keet: Initially, we were all shocked to an extent, because we never expected such an exotic disease of a cooler climate to actually penetrate our healthy ecosystem, and we thought it was just a flash in the pan, because it was right on the periphery of the park. But, subsequently, we found that the park was already well infiltrated.

Sara & Keet in lab

Sara: Dr Keet’s initial suspicions of tuberculosis were met with scepticism from some of his colleagues. The outbreak which he described, was difficult to see. The evidence was deep inside the bones and the organs of the lions.

Keet: The bone got weakened by the tuberculosis lesions and obviously the lion is living a very hard life and when he’s got to hunt, there’s tremendous stresses on his legs and fractures are likely to occur.

Cattle in Park

Sara: Bovine tuberculosis came into the park more than 40 years ago. It arrived with cattle, which strayed into the park from neighbouring farms.

They soon passed on the disease to wild buffalo which were grazing in the same area.

Buffalo

Each time an infected member of the herd coughed or spluttered, tiny droplets of TB bacteria were released into the air.

It was breathed in by the buffalo and slowly multiplied in their lungs.

Sara & Keet in lab

Keet: The damage eventually is immense, because ultimately about 80 percent of the lung volume can become infected with lesions like this, so the animal hasn’t got the capacity to run away, it's not fit at all any more any more and becomes easy prey of lions.

And lions are very lazy animals. They would obviously go for the cripples, and the slow animals and they’d rather scavenge that kill animals.

Feeding Lions

Sara: The lions were soon paying a heavy price for what appeared to be an easy meal. They ate the mature tuberculosis directly from the infected buffalo.

Keet

Keet: You know, people believed that lions became infected, but they were, they were a bit sceptical when they heard the percentage of lions in the so called high prevalence areas, which is, at the time of our last survey, which was 78 percent.

Mills

Sara: One of those sceptics is Dr. Gus Mills, the parks ecologist.

Mills: Yes, we’ve got the disease, yes it’s here, yes there is some concern about it, but we are looking at it and really we’ve got to report the facts and I think one must be careful not to take isolated incidents out of context and say this is what’s happening over the whole population.

Crocodile Bridge pride

Sara: But, some of the once mighty prides of Kruger have already fallen victim to TB. This was the Crocodile Bridge pride two years ago, one of the best known and extensively researched prides in the park. Now they are no more. Riddled with TB, they were easy prey for neighbouring lions.

Keet

Keet: Two territories have been taken over by two completely new prides, and this has never been described before. It is absolute abnormal lion behaviour and it’s purely because both the male and female component of the older pride became weakened due to the disease.

Feeding Lions

Sara: But Dr. Gus Mills believes it’s all part of nature. And something that tourists visiting Kruger must come to terms with.

Mills

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Dr. Gus Mills

Ecologist, Kruger National Park

Mills: We always have sick animals -- and I think this is something the public has to accept -- is that nature is cruel and that animals sometimes do get injured or they do get thin and they do die sometimes a horrible death, slow deaths by starvation.

Infected Lions

Sara: Dewald Keet believes tuberculosis could have an impact well beyond the boundaries of the park.

Keet

Keet: We’ve only got about 21,000 lions left on the entire African continent and it’s not much of a genetic pool, and you need genetic diversity to maintain the wellbeing of the species, and if a disease is slowly eroding away on a population, it’s going to influence genetic diversity over a very long period of time and I don’t think we can afford losing individuals and losing genetic diversity due to some exotic disease that landed up on this continent.

Mills

Mills: What is important to us is not the individual animal, it’s the population. Is our population healthy, is our population turning over at an acceptable limit on the numbers, fluctuating and all population numbers do fluctuate. They go up and down as ecological conditions change. Are those acceptable to us and are those what we would consider to be within a natural fluctuations? And so far all the evidence is that yes this is happening.

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Infected animals in park

Sara: But as tuberculosis spreads further into the park, it is becoming more difficult to contain.

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Dewald Keet in park

Just before sunset Dewald Keet prepares to call in a pride of lions, to be tested for TB. It’s a difficult task. He uses loud speakers to play the sounds of an animal in distress, to attract the lions.

As they feed, he darts them one by one with anaesthetic.

While the lions are sedated, Dr. Keet, injects tuberculin under their skin. He also fits radio collars -- he needs to catch exactly the same lions in 72 hours time, to check the results. It’s a time consuming process.

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first light in Kruger National Park

With tuberculosis already infecting up to 78 percent of lions in the worst affected areas, it’s vital to gain more information on the hosts of the disease, the buffalo.

At first light, members of the buffalo TB research project, are looking for the herds.

Cross

Cross: It's not typically that difficult, it's just sometimes they're not close to the road, and then it takes us a little bit longer.

Sara: Paul Cross is a member of the research team.

Sara: In some parts of Kruger, up to 90 percent of the buffalo are host to the disease.

Cross: The point of this project is to understand how TB is spreading through the park, try to get a handle on which management strategies are going to be more effective.

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Cross with Buffalo

Cross: From the work we’ve done so far that you would need to vaccinate a large portion of each herd every year in the park, and at the moment there’s roughly twenty six thousand buffalo in the park.

Cross

So that means vaccinating probably upwards of eighty to one hundred percent of those individuals and then revaccinating the new individuals each year for many years. So, for me, it’s hard to fathom having the, having the financial and the logistically capability of being able to do that in a system like Kruger Park.

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Researchers with Buffalo

Sara: The researchers are testing the buffalo for TB. Blood and tissue samples are taken for analysis. The buffalo is then branded and videoed for future reference. Like the lions, a radio collar is fitted so that it can be found again in the vastness of the park. It’s a swift raid. All in the name of science.

Ranger in Kruger Park

In the north of the park, away from the worst affected regions, tuberculosis is almost out of sight. Many of the lions here are yet to show any signs of the illness.

The rangers are keeping a close watch for symptoms, but it could be only a matter of time before these too become infected.

Ranger: He is in good condition. He does look like he's actually doing fine, even though the circumstances…

Sara: There are fears that TB could spread further into Kruger Park, and beyond its boundaries. The park and its surroundings are not isolated from one and other.

Kruger Park

Now it’s not a case of keeping the disease out of Kruger. It’s all about keeping it in, and preventing it from spreading into surrounding areas. Where it has escaped, drastic measures have already been taken.

Hunters shooting Lions

The owners of this private game reserve outside Kruger were ordered to kill all of their lions.

The 11 males and females had tested positive for TB.

Hunter : Shoot it again, shoot it again. Shoot it again, quickly. Shoot it! Stop, stop, stop!

Sara: The owners of the reserve called in fee paying hunters in an effort to recoup some of the costs of losing the lions.

Van Eyeson

Van Eyeson: Well I think you know everyone was very, very shattered and very upset because it’s a big part of tourism. A lion is probably the one thing the tourists do want to see when they come into a game reserve or a private game reserve. It’s on, it tops their list – lion and leopard would probably top their list. So yeah, this was very shattering.

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Lions of Kwa Madwala

Sara: The lions of Kwa Madwala reserve became trophies for the hunters.

Government vets say there was no choice but to order the shooting of the animals. But they deny that the decision to cull was an overreaction.

Du Plessis: Well, I don’t say we are overreacting. The thing is, we don’t know much of the occurrences of this disease in game because it’s difficult to do surveys.

Sara: What if you are wrong, if you've acted too quickly when the facts are not yet available?

Du Plessis

Du Plessis: Well it’s always easy to say in retrospect that you've been wrong. And I don't think a wrong can be corrected by anything else, but at the time with a lack of knowledge, I don’t think we’ve overreacted at all.

Johannes van der Walt & Sara

Sara: Now, officials from neighbouring reserves are understandably nervous.

Johannes van der Walt is a ranger at Marloth park, a local government reserve that shares a boundary with Kruger.

Sara: Where is he now, Johan?

Johan: He might be up there on the road…

Infected Lion

Sara: Rangers like Johannes fear that tuberculosis is spreading. This lion should be in his prime. He’s yet to be tested, but he’s already showing the signs of TB.

Johannes: His condition is not that good at this stage. He looks like a very hungry lion, but you can see, you know, he’s still got some food in his stomach. His stomach is not really completely empty. So, obviously what he’s doing is he's scavenging off whatever the other animals in the pride is catching.

Johannes

What most probably will happen with this one, he'll be killed by other males. Because, you know, they're go into quite serious fighting in such a takeover. And in his condition he won't be able to defend himself to another lion. Even if it's four or five years old. So he most probably will be killed anyhow.

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Tourists in bus

Sara: It’s a problem without a clear solution. If authorities shoot all the infected lions, they risk damaging the tourist trade. And even if the lions were culled. TB would live on in other species. The other option is simply to allow nature to take its course.

Whichever path is chosen by officials, the future for lions of the Kruger national park is uncertain.

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Credits:

TB LIONS

Reporter: Sally Sara

Camera: Greg Nelson

Editor: Stuart Miller

Producer: Ashley Smith

Additional footage: Wild Pictures