Gut Wrenching News on the Wildlife Conservation Front

We had some devastatingly, gut wrenching news this past week from our dear friends in Uganda about 6 lions who were found dead and mutilated in the Ishasha sector of the Queen Elizabeth Park.

The Uganda Wildlife Authority reported that they were found with most of their body parts missing. Although this lead them to believe it could have been poachers illegally trafficking, there were also eight dead vultures at the scene indicating that the lions were likely poisoned! Sadly, they're the lions that we saw when we were there last November.

These delightful lions are the famous tree climbing lions of Ishasha and adored by all visitors to the park to view them in their natural habitat. Unfortunately, not everyone is enamoured by these lions due to their natural instinct to seek food that sometimes happens to be local farmers' livestock.

An educational program has been running for a while in certain areas to try to enable these farmers to understand the importance of wildlife to this park and the nation through tourism. Funds collected from the parks is even shared with the local communities to assist with their livelihood.

A brilliant conservationist named Deo has championed this cause and has been working very hard to educate and inform his local community. There's hope that more of this can be spread throughout the area to deter this from happening in the future. It's a very difficult task though when the communities feel as threatened as they do by these animals.

Africa and animal conservation so require our assistance to visit to continue to provide much needed tourism dollars to help in the fight against trafficking and this sort of poisoning of our precious animals.

On the home front, this past week at the our Golf and Country Club here in Southwest Florida, our Social Committee promoted a wonderful more localized conservationist event. It was well attended and everyone found it extremely interesting and informative about the wildlife that we're surrounded by here.

This most recent talk was done by the Peace River Wildlife Center focusing primarily on the great work they do with rescuing and rehabilitating small animals and birds.

We figure that this will be the first in a series of some great sessions that we can consider to inform our residents about the beauty and nature that surrounds us every day. We all get so much appreciation out of the birdlife and for the most part, the other varied wildlife that we have here including bobcats, panthers, alligators, and even wild boar to name a few.

Bad news and good news all in the same week about wildlife both internationally and locally.