News

Dangerously cute

I tuned in to the ITV Daybreak show this morning, and listened to what actor Jerome Flynn (Ripper Street, Game of Thrones) had to say about lions.

Jerome mentioned 8,000 lions in captivity, bred to be killed, treated like commodities for twisted prides and egos. He mentioned that African wildlife is under extreme threat, the “system” is on the edge, and we are losing lions at a great rate. Thanks Jerome, good message.

But then he deflected onto very thin ice by bringing up white lions. He said they were a separate subspecies, and that they were sacred across Africa.

White lions are not a subspecies. In a recent publication in the journal Nature reporting on the whole genome sequencing of the Amur tiger, the researchers also looked at sections of the white lion genome. They found that the white coat colour is a result of a single nucleotide substitution resulting in a single amino acid change in an enzyme called Tyrosinase. That enzyme had previously been associated with white coat colour in domestic cats.

By extension, you might as well call people with red hair a human subspecies.

White lions are white due to what geneticists call a “single point mutation”. That mutation occurred in a small population of lions to the west of Kruger National Park in South Africa. So popular were these white coat colour lions that they were almost hunted to extinction. A few survivors were captured and bred in captivity.

Because the white coat colour mutation is in addition a recessive trait – meaning that the mutation has to be present on both parentally inherited chromosomes to be expressed – there has been a very high level of inbreeding to produce more and more white lions. Zoo regulatory agencies in Europe and the USA strongly advise against breeding white lions. Such inbreeding has already been shown to result in a number of deleterious conditions like skeletal deformities and neurological and digestive abnormalities.

Many zoos have been involved in specifically breeding white lions to gain extra income from their customers. A zoo in the UK was recently involved in a scandal – they sold their excess white lions via an intermediary to a circus in Japan. Another zoo offered petting opportunities for their recently born white lion cub.

The zoos justify their purchases of white lions from South Africa and their own inbreeding by claiming that white lions are genetically different, endangered, sacred. One zoo in the UK even claimed that visiting a white lion would bring good fortune.

White lions might be sacred to a small minority of people in Africa, but most African tribes have never encountered white lions. But they will have encountered similarly leucistic snakes, birds, fish, mammals – colour variations among animals are not common, but they do happen.

Let’s just call white lions what they are – an animal with a rare and recessive coat colour mutation. By giving then some sort of “special” status we are encouraging world zoos and lion breeders in South Africa to keep propagating already inbred animals. That is just plain wrong.

Picture credit – telegraph.co.uk

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