Lion in 2016: US threatened listing talk

Lions structure some savanna systems; elephants and wolves outrank both as engineers or keystones in this atlas. Culture is flags, churches and film -- lions win that axis. Scores stay relative across 24 types. Asiatic lions are a single-forest population with a distinctive belly fold and a thinner mane. A disease or fire there is a subspecies event.

The 2015 Hwange killing spiked petitions and some airline trophy bans. Zimbabwe and US Fish and Wildlife arguments did not end trophy hunting as a system. Are lions recovering like some wolves? No. Most African populations are still in long decline outside a few well-funded parks. VU is not a rebound band.

What did Born Free fix in the public mind? Elsa the lioness (1960 book, 1966 film) made rehabilitation a children story. Field lion work is pride demography and conflict, not a single tame cat. The Serengeti Lion Project (Packer and successors) produced the long pride dataset that textbooks still mine.