BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When we think of endangered species we think of the red wolf, the black rhinoceros or even the short-haired chinchilla — if we think of them at all. But people rarely consider the big cats.
Nat Geo Wild will chronicle some of these lithe predators when it plays its own game of Hello, Kitty with “Big Cat Week,” beginning Sunday.
One of the featured films will be “The Last Lions” by Dereck and Beverly Joubert, wildlife photographers and researchers who’ve been stalking the stalkers for 30 years.
“One of the alarming things for us, which was the sort of genesis of this film and this ‘Big Cat Week,’ actually, is that we discovered that in our lifetimes, lion numbers have dropped from 450,000 down to 20,000, and the leopard numbers are from 700,000 down to 50,000,” said Dereck Joubert.
It’s hard to believe, but more tigers are living in captivity today than in the wild.
“And by that sort of extension of curve, you will imagine these big cats to be extinct within the next 10 or 15 years,” he said.
The Jouberts were born in South Africa, but say they moved to Botswana because they “needed to go out into the real Africa. ... I thought that the big cats would lead us into a greater understanding of the rest of Africa, and then we kind of got stuck there,” said Dereck.
Why the big cats? Why not apes or crocodiles or prairie dogs? “They really are the iconic species in Africa,” said Beverly Joubert. “Without saving the apex predator, we’re going to lose vast tracts of land. If the apex predator is taken out of the system, the whole system will collapse. But also, man will move into the system, and man will eventually take every single animal out of there as bush meat. So we ultimately need to keep the apex predators alive so that we’ve got corridors for elephants, for antelope, and the tiny little dung beetles. It is vitally important.”
Part of the “Big Cats Week” is the National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative, a long-term commitment to staunch the decline of these denizens of the wild. While cheetahs have disappeared from more than 75 percent of their range, the cheetah story offers a glimmer of hope, says Dereck Joubert.
“Cheetahs today came out of a genetic bottleneck of about 200 individuals and then grew back up to about 45,000 to 50,000. Today they’re down around 12,000. But the fact that you can actually recover a species is what gives us so much hope, and we think that we can do exactly the same with lions and leopards.”
The Jouberts spend days on end watching wildlife do its thing. They see the animals prosper and perish. Sometimes it’s hard to watch and not intervene, says Beverly.
“It’s heart-wrenching. On a daily basis it’s heart-wrenching. So I don’t know if we’ve got a certain personality. We have a concern of looking at the bigger picture and wanting to protect wildlife in general. And so it is wrong of us to believe that we are going to play God with nature. This has been happening for millions of years. What we’re trying to do is show how unique and how similar, actually, wildlife is to us by doing that (observing) — and not interfering — even though it is heart-wrenching. Often Dereck and I will say that we’re more emotionally drained than physically drained even though we’re working 16 to 18 hours a day.”
The two-hour premiere of “The Last Lions” airs Dec. 16.
