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be supportive; that public revenues are
needed to fund targeted poverty alleviation
projects; that well-defined property rights
and clarity about who is going to pay for
what are essential foundations of any project
aimed at improving the plight of the poor;
that water is essential to sustaining life; that
individuals often fail to favour the interests
of distant communities at cost to themselves;
that wealth can cause more damage to
ecosystems than poverty. Many good points,
long known.

The book would have benefited from a
biologist to help with fact checking, thereby
avoiding calling elephants ‘keynote species’;
naming Costa Rica and South Africa as ‘the
two countries best known for their biodiver-
sity’ (this will come as a surprise to Brazil
and Indonesia, for example); or claiming
that a wetland in Costa Rica was declared a
Ramsar Site in 1951, a few decades before the
Convention on Wetlands of International
Importance came into force. Small problems,
easily fixed.

While the conclusions may be familiar, it
is useful to have some specific examples,
backed up by economics, to give them greater
currency and broader application. Who
knows, if enough people can recognize that
poverty alleviation is likely to be beneficial to
conservation when these two enterprises are
undertaken appropriately and in recognition
of relative costs and benefits, then maybe loss
of biodiversity can be slowed and eventually
stopped. This book helps clarify the challenges
that need to be faced before this happy state
can be reached.

JEFF MCNEELY Hua Hin, Thailand
E-mail jam@iucn.org

Exotic Aliens: The Lion and the Cheetah in
India by Valmik Thapar, Romila Thapar &
Yusuf Ansari (2013), 304 pp., Aleph Book
Company, New Delhi, India. ISBN 978-9-382-
27755-2 (hbk) GBP 26.50.

When I was young the conservation world was
much simpler and nature seemed to be easy to
identify, if not to save. It is getting harder and
harder to even figure out what we’re supposed
to save—we just don’t seem to know what
nature is any more. Novel ecosystems, alien
species, forest composition altered by long
absent humans, overabundant species, native

species expanding their range, and changing
ecosystems—the list goes on and on.

Exotic Aliens has made the task even
harder. Perhaps you already know about the
Gir lions, that small population of lions found
in the western Indian state of Gujarat—the
only lions currently occurring outside Africa.
There have been lots of explanations for how
the distribution of lions had to have collapsed,
leaving only this remnant population. But no
one that I read ever contemplated that these
lions may not in fact be native to India but
were in fact established by humans with
animals shipped in from Africa. The same
argument holds for Indian cheetahs.

The book makes this bold argument, but in
humble fashion. The lead author says that
what he wants is for the book to create a stir in
the natural history world and inspire people to
do more detailed research. I hope he gets his
wish. The principal author, Valmik Thapar, is
a self-styled naturalist who has done much
to publicize the natural history of Indian
tigers and who stumbled on this topic while
researching 500 years of recorded tiger sight-
ings. He observed that for every thousand
tigers recorded as killed per year there were
fewer than a handful of lions and cheetahs.
This finding diverted him from his tiger
research and on to the path that produced
Exotic Aliens. To help him build his argument
he enlisted two historians, Romila Thapar and
Yusuf Ansari, who contributed three chapters
reviewing what is known about the pre-history
and history of cheetahs and lions in India.

The major conclusion of the book is that
lions were imported from Africa and Persia,
starting 2,500 years ago, to meet the demands
of the Indian royalty, who bred and propa-
gated them as court symbols and for hunting.
The desire for lions was also an import,
coming from the Greeks and Persians, for
whom the lion was the symbol of power and
the killing of a lion the ultimate sign of
personal (royal) strength. The cheetah’s story
was both similar and different. It was
imported as a pet and as a domesticated
hunter that at times escaped and created small,
feral populations.

The Indian royals were great hunters, both
in the wild and in hunting gardens. These
walled enclosures were stocked with game that
was killed at leisure and with the occasional
aid of opium to drug the prey. If you needed
to kill a lion and there were no wild lions at
hand then lions had to be bred to be released
for the hunt. So there was apparently active
lion husbandry going on. And some escaped

or were released when the the hunting garden
tradition was abandoned. And thus we got the
Gir lions. Cheetahs were imported and trained
to hunt antelope and it was not uncommon to
see cheetahs and their trainers in many parts
of India.

The major point that Thapar makes is not
a new one, and he acknowledges on the first
page of the prologue that: ‘the debate about
the origins and prevalence of lions and
cheetahs in India must have been vigorous in
the eighteenth century’. But that debate sank
beneath the waves and left us with the puzzle
of how to use our high-powered genetics and
biogeography to explain this distributional
anomaly. As an example, a recent paper by
Bertola et al. (2011, Journal of Biogeography, 38,
1356–1367) on African lion genetics concluded:
‘West and Central African lions are more
closely related to Asiatic lions than to the
southern and East African lions. This can be
explained by a Pleistocene extinction and
subsequent recolonization of West Africa
from refugia in the Middle East’. Or, by the
Thapar thesis!

Why do I think this is more than a
historical curiosity to recount to young
graduate students or impressionable dates?
My training in ecology (in the late 1970s and
1980s) was curiously a-historical and treated
humans as being outside ecology. That is no
longer the case but we have still not reconciled
ourselves to the important role history has
played in determining what we think of as
natural, and therefore worth saving. Books
such as this flush us out of our scientific cover
and force us to confront the values and
relativistic nature of our science and how
they both inform what we choose to conserve.
So what if lions are not native to India? They’ve
been there for hundredsofyears, are functional
components of a (deeply human-altered)
ecosystem and firmly imbedded in Indian
culture. India wants more lions—witness the
recent Indian Supreme Court case in which
the state of Gujarat was forced to share a few of
its lions with the state of Madhya Pradesh, to
create a new population. Or are they alien
speciesthatshouldbe returnedto zoos? Sowho
decides and on what basis? This is a great book
to use as part of what I hope will be a new
graduate training seminar—historical ecology,
humans, and the conservation of the future.

KENT REDFORD Archipelago Consulting,
Portland, USA
E-mail redfordkh@gmail.com

466 Publications

© 2014 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 48(3), 465–466

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