A male and female lion mauled an intruder to death after he climbed two fences and entered their enclosure at the Ghana Zoo in Accra, the capital of Ghana. In all likelihood, the lions were protecting their cubs — an adorable pair of white lion cubs, which have delighted throngs of zoo-goers since their birth in November.

“The lions have cubs so if you come too close they may feel you are trying to take away their babies,” Deputy Minister for Lands and Natural Resources Benito Owusu Bio told journalists. “We ask the public to desist from doing anything like this.”

White lions are extremely rare — estimates suggest there are only 13 left living in the wild, according to the Global White Lion Protection Trust, an organization that has established a scientific program to reintroduce the lions into the areas where they once occurred naturally. They are native to South Africa and have been seen in the Greater Timbavati and Southern Kruger National Park region.

It’s that rarity that may have led the man, a suspected poacher, to scale the fences, which were 10 and 20 feet tall respectively, BBC News reports. Wildlife authorities say they suspect the man may have hoped to steal the two cubs, but quite obviously mom and dad had other ideas.

I’m not going to pretend to be sad that the lions successfully protected their cubs and did exactly what they would do in the wild — maul a suspected poacher to death. I have no sympathy for poachers.

And I’m going to bring up the elephant in the room: In a world where the human population is estimated at more than 7.9 billion and our rare and precious wildlife is disappearing at a frightening rate, the death of a poacher isn’t even a drop in the human population bucket. Indeed, the human population is galloping ahead with 265,000+ births today (Tuesday) while more than one in four wildlife species currently faces extinction. By the end of this century, at least 50 percent of all wild species will be at critical risk of extinction, according to The World Counts.

I don’t know what the man was intending to do, but if he had managed to steal the two cubs it almost certainly wouldn’t have ended well for them. The incident occurred Sunday, and the man’s body has since been taken to a local morgue. The Accra Zoo is temporarily closed as police investigate the intruder’s motives and the circumstances of the attack.

The cubs were born in November as the result of breeding a male lion and a female lion with recessive traits known as leucism. While you might think this is a form of albinism, it’s not at all. Treehugger reports that “while albinism refers to the complete lack of melanin—the natural pigment that gives skin, feathers, hair, and eyes its color—leucism involves a partial loss of pigmentation.”

See, now there’s a thing you know. Aren’t big cats beautiful? Especially when we leave them alone?

To learn more about white lions and how you can help them, go here.