I think human life in general is held in higher regard than animal life by the majority of the humans on the planet if you really stop and think about it.

This is simply another form of ecosystem imbalance; we kill lions, we use medicine to encourage unfit humans to survive and reproduce and intensive agriculture to produce many times more food than could be grown using natural methods. The effect is the same as with any other predator-prey imbalance: the prey animal populations expand far beyond the ecosystem's carrying capacity, leading to stress, disease, weakness, starvation, and numerous other ills among the prey population. Eventually the prey population is reduced dramatically as nature kills off huge numbers of unfit animals.

You're welcome to call me callous, but I choose not to cry for humans, African or otherwise.

People are more socially capable than that, so I wouldn't look to such a base motivation first. Especially for people who don't deal with the scarcity of resources in day to day life. In general people are just taught to hate eachother.

Whether it's the countrymen of a foreign land when our government is mad at their government; or our next door neighbors that don't share the rigid political ideological of our favorite bloggers. We are taught to hate every single day.

That belief system is missing the reality of the similarity between individuals in different classes, the current trends which seem to actually aim toward inverted population movement, massive resource efficiency improvements possible with better application of technology to society, and the inherent value of human life vs. lower life (see ideas like the noosphere).

There's also PEPFAR which is notable for how many lives it has saved for Africans with HIV.

Still, I'm pretty sure that the average American neither knows nor cares about either program and wouldn't raise a finger if either went away. But they care a shitload about the lion.