After hours of searching, I am ready to give up when, in a stroke of luck and guide instinct, we drive across a final signalgrass plain and find the three lions lying in the shade of a leadwood tree. The young male bears raw, scarred flanks from encounters with his father's rivals, and Motakatshipi predicts that he will soon be driven off by the bigger males attempting to form a new pride with his mother and sister. "It will be the start of a terrible time for him," Motakatshipi says.

Scientists frown on anthropomorphism. But how can we avoid it when animal lives seem so similar to our own? The lost tribe. The young prince wandering the wilderness before returning to do battle for his throne. Before traveling to Botswana, I made an appointment to meet in Johannesburg wildlife filmmaker Dereck Joubert, who has spent the last twenty-five years living in the bush, observing Botswana's lions and getting to know the animals as individuals and not as mere numbers. His Emmy Award–winning documentary, Eternal Enemies, about the rivalry between hyenas and lions, was the basis for Disney's The Lion King.

"Lions are cultural animals," Joubert tells me in the cutting room where he is editing his most recent project, about a pride that specializes in killing buffalo. In the 1980s and '90s, Joubert and his wife and filmmaking partner, Beverly, saw many of their favorite subjects shot by trophy hunters. Nicknamed Ra de Tau ("Father of the Lion") by Setswana-speaking guides, Joubert feels guilty for having habituated the now-dead lions to humans and vehicles. "Trophy hunting and record books exist for one reason: selfish recreation," he says bitterly. "To those people who sit around trying to justify more shooting, I say, "Is it enough to preserve lions as a species, or do we want to preserve cultures, even individual animals, as we would in our own lives?'"

"This animal is not Simba or Aslan," counters Craig Packer, a wiry University of Minnesota biologist who has studied lions in Tanzania for more than thirty years and who, coincidentally, is attending a World Conservation Union lion conference in a hotel a few blocks from Joubert's studio. In southern Tanzania, he tells me, lions living near villages start specializing in bush pigs, which tend to thrive after farmers extirpate other game. At harvest time, when villagers sleep in the fields to protect their crops from pigs, they themselves become prey for the lions, which then start targeting humans. "Can you imagine North Americans agreeing to live side by side with a species that kills a hundred people a year? It's very easy for those in a comfortable city to say, "Oh, the poor lions—they mustn't be hunted.'"

Protected by barbed wire and private security guards, the dingy hotel is crawling with khaki-clad lion experts sharing their latest data from the field. During the lunch break, I ask Packer to explain Tanzania's lion-hunting conundrum. Some eighty percent of the country's designated wilderness consists of huge private hunting concessions, and yet Tanzania has more lions than any other country—perhaps half the continent's population. Hunting concessions placed strategically around national parks have acted as a buffer between wildlife and the local people. And to preserve their "crop" for future generations, the more conscientious hunting companies plow profits into conservation in the form of fees to villages and grants for scientific research.