CECIL THE LION: FIVE YEARS ON
It is five years today since the tragic death of Cecil the lion, killed by bow and arrow at the hands of American dentist Walter Palmer. Did the global outcry create a lasting impact for wild lions like Cecil?
Read more in our latest story below on Cecil’s legacy and the conservation strategies that are most important for the continued protection and recovery of wild lions.
It was five years ago today that the name “Cecil the Lion” reverberated around the planet in a collective outpouring of sadness, anger and disgust. Cecil, a collared male lion whose home was Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe - the dominant male and most “handsome” of his pride - was lured out of the park to be illegally hunted by American dentist Walter Palmer.
Cecil, then 12 years old, had both a name and a collar. He was the park’s main attraction and was habituated to vehicles, making him a favorite of visiting photographers and safari guests. Cecil was one of 42 collared male lions in the park who was monitored daily over 8 years by researchers only for his life to come to a slow, painful and unnatural end on July 2, 2015.
It was his collar that alerted the team of lion monitors that something was amiss. It suddenly stopped transmitting GPS data for two days and then blinked back to life, only to stop again after travelling a relatively short distance for a lion. Was the collar malfunctioning?
Was Cecil dead?
The monitoring team set out to investigate, revealing Cecil’s grim fate and a murky set of circumstances including the intentional use of an elephant carcass as bait to lure Cecil out of the park. A failed first “hunt” in the middle of the night ended with an arrow hitting its mark on Cecil, leaving him mortally wounded but not dead. Piecing the timeline back together with confessions from local hunting guides, Palmer returned over 10 hours later to finish the job. He shot another arrow to pierce Cecil’s wounded body, this time killing him, before his collar was destroyed to cover the team’s tracks and guilt. A $50,000 price tag was what it took to ‘order’ a big beautiful male lion for this illegal hunt. Cecil’s suffering for over 10 hours was the price of a cruel vanity, so that Walter Palmer could record his hunt as a bow-kill, more esteemed in hunting circles and rankings than a gun-hunt and the mercy a quick bullet would have provided.
Two young lion cubs. Photo credit: Shannon Wild.
That’s the point of trophy hunting: lions and other animals are selected for their perceived beauty and size, and the status this brings. This is particularly problematic for lions, with the death of a dominant male triggering a chain of devastating consequences for his cubs, often killed by incoming rivals. Thankfully in the case of Cecil, his brother Jericho searched and called for him for days in a low rumble so as not to alert rivals before returning to the pride. Jericho did not kill the the cubs but took them under his protection. It was a touching update in a lion drama that gripped the world’s animal lovers, united in concern, anger and outrage over the killing of Cecil.
“Cecil” put a name and a full-maned face to the decline of wild lions and thrust trophy hunting into the spotlight. Over 1 million people signed a petition demanding “justice for Cecil”. This surge of support for lions in the wild had its sights set firmly on trophy hunters.
While Walter Palmer became the most hated individual in America for that moment in time, he was ultimately charged with a felony for making a false statement to a federal investigator and was fined less than $3000 with one year’s probation. A slap on the wrist - incensing activists further.
Around the world, there was resulting swift action for lions. Australia, France and the Netherlands moved quickly to ban the import of lion trophies. Britain promised to do so by 2017 but this has been delayed (a public consultation period ended this February). A total of 45 airlines have now adopted wildlife trophy bans after Cecil’s death.
After a 5 year relentless push by conservation groups, lions were listed on the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) in December 2015. This tightened laws that restrict the importation of lion trophies and lion body parts, such as trophies, feet and skins, to the United States. However, it was not a total ban - the listing prohibits importing lion trophies except “when it can be found that the import will have a benefit to the species.” Hunters who want to bring lion trophies into the US now have to show that the imports were legally obtained from countries that have “a scientifically sound management program that benefits the subspecies in the wild.” Perversely, trophy hunting of lions increased in the wake of Cecil’s death, due to the looming threat of a complete ban. In 2017, despite the ESA listing, the United States allowed the import of 84 lions, the largest number of any country that year, followed by Hungary with 74. The European Union as a whole is a large importer of dead lions; CITES data revealed that the EU imported a total of 406 lion trophies in 2017 and 2018.
While the trophy hunting bans focus on individual lions and the morality of trophy hunting, the reality is that this is unfortunately not the driving force behind the catastrophic decline of lion populations in Africa from an estimated 450,000 in the 1950s to an estimated 32,000 today. Lions are disappearing for a reason far harder to solve: habitat loss and bushmeat poaching.
Lion populations have collapsed for different reasons across Africa depending on range countries and local circumstances: To truly make an impact in the recovery of wild lion populations we need to be focused on the major causes of their disappearance:
Habitat loss due to agricultural expansion
Encroachment on wild lands by people and livestock
Poaching of lion prey for bushmeat, and
Human-wildlife conflict (including retaliation for livestock predation)
In West and Central Africa, the primary cause of lion killing is due to poaching and bushmeat. Illegal hunting for bushmeat affects lions in two ways; by dramatically reducing the populations of animals that are food sources for lions and by directly killing lions who inadvertently are caught in the wire snares that are set to illegally trap other species for food.
In southern Africa, habitat destruction is the main threat to Africa’s lion populations. This includes the loss of habitat connectivity - human settlement and development are creating even smaller pockets of wilderness in which lions and their prey exist, making it challenging or impossible for lions to roam or safely disperse, restricting gene flow leaving populations vulnerable to diseases and other threats.
And as if the challenges facing beleaguered lions and conservationists fighting on their behalf were not enough, they now face a new and emerging threat: targeted poaching of their body parts for the illegal wildlife trade (and the legal trade - 800 lion bones are legally exported each year from South Africa).
What are the conservation solutions to lion recovery in southern Africa?
Securing and linking habitat for wildlife is a roadmap for not only creating more space for lions, but all other species. Wild Tomorrow Fund believes that the most important action for the protection and recovery of lions and other species is the protection of habitat and the creation of wildlife corridors to link as many of the small fragmented reserves together as possible.
A recent study published in the journal Biological Conservation (May 2017) found that if existing Protected Areas (PAs) could be managed and financed well, lion populations could increase by four. “Conservation outcomes for lions were best explained by management variables. PAs tended to be more effective for conserving lions and/or their prey where management budgets were higher, where photographic tourism was the primary land use, and, for prey, where fencing was present. Lions and prey fared less well relative to their estimated potential carrying capacities in poorer countries, where people were settled within PAs and where PAs were used for neither photographic tourism nor trophy hunting.”
The bottom line is that to adequately protect existing parks, what is needed is more funding so that government and private reserves are able to adequately protect all of the precious biodiversity, including lions, within their borders. A 2018 study by Panthera, the WCS, Kenya Wildlife Services and others, found that nearly all PAs with lions are inadequately funded; deficits total $0.9 to $2.1 billion (Lindsey et al. 2017). Revenue from trophy hunting is a drop in the ocean of funds needed to fill this funding gap.
“Give lions that label and use their “sex appeal” to generate the funds needed to replace hunting as the defining use of thousands of square kilometres of land.”
“If the world loves lions, and by that I largely mean the western world, then they have to help pay for them” said Cecil researcher Brent Stapelkamp in an interview with National Geographic in 2016. “Africa cannot be expected to front the bill for animals that, for the most part, Africans can’t afford to see. Often their only impression of them is one that is based on the conflict that lions have with their livestock.” Brent called for lions to be declared the first World Heritage Species, with funding from the international community to help in their protection.
The good news is that in the aftermath of Cecil there have been new funding streams and campaigns formed to help lions and their habitats, and to start plugging the conservation funding gap.
The Lion Recovery Fund was launched in 2017, backed by the Leonardo DeCaprio Foundation, with a goal to double the number of lions by 2050, focused on protecting landscapes and “ensuring lions, their habitats and prey, and people thrive”. They have granted over $8.2 million to date for 86 projects in 20 lion countries,
The Lion’s Share Fund, an initiative launched by the film and advertising industry in partnership with the UN Development Programme, aims to harness global corporate advertising budgets to carve out a share for lions and wildlife. The idea is that for any campaign that uses the images of animals, a contribution of 0.5% percentage of the budget will be contributed to help protecting the animal’s habitat in the wild. The Fund’s goal is to raise $100 million a year by 2021. It is not clear how successful this initiative has been.
While the challenges facing lions are great, the pathway recovery is remarkably simple. We urge a shift away from the debates over trophy hunting to the more pressing question: ensuring that wildlife parks in Africa are adequately funded so that they can keep wildlife safe and poachers at bay. With tourism revenue all but ground to a halt due to COVID19, this is an even more urgent proposition. Let’s make sure that the roar of a wild lion is a sound that carries into a more sustainable future.
To support Wild Tomorrow Fund’s work to protect lions and expand habitat, please consider making a donation.
Please help direct your passion for lion protection into strategies and projects that will make a difference. Consider booking a post-COVID eco-safari at a responsibly managed wildlife reserve in Africa. Donate to organizations that support rangers and habitat conservation. Help to fund translocation projects.
Together we can ensure lions and all species who share their habitats have a wild future.
A lioness and her cubs, Kenya. Photo credit: Nadja Rutkowski
References
“An Inside Look at Cecil the Lion’s Final Hours.” National Geographic Wildlife Watch, 3 March 2018. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/wildlife-watch-cecil-trophy-hunting-andrew-loveridge/#close
Bauer, H., Packer, C., Funston, P.F., Henschel, P. & Nowell, K. 2016. Panthera leo (errata version published in 2017). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T15951A115130419. http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-3.RLTS.T15951A107265605.en.
Bauer, H., Chapron, G., Nowell, K., Henschel, P., Funston, P., Hunter, Luke T.B., Macdonald, D. & Packer, C. Lion (Panthera leo) populations are declining rapidly across Africa, except in intensively managed areas. PNAS December 1, 2015 112(48) 14894-14899. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1500664112
Cecil the Lion one Year on: An Interview with Cecil’s researcher. National Geographic Society Newsroom. 7 July 2016. https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2016/07/07/cecil-the-lion-one-year-on-an-interview-with-cecils-researcher/
CITES Press Release. Saving lions: Africa agrees on a way forward. Entebbe, Uganda, 1 June 2016. https://cites.org/eng/saving_lions_Africa_agrees_on_ways_forward
Conniff, Richard. Angry Tweets Won't Help African Lions. New York Times, 1 July 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/angry-tweets-wont-help-african-lions.html
Environmental Investigations Agency (2017) The lions’ share; South Africa’s trade exacerbates demand for tiger parts and derivatives. EIA report https://eia-international.org/report/the-lions-share.
Humane Society International (2015). More then 42 Airlines Adopt Wildlife Trophy Bans after Cecil the Lion’s Death. https://www.hsi.org/news-media/42-airlines-adopt-wildlife-trophy-bans-082715/#
Lindsey, Peter A., Balme, Guy B.A., Funston, P.J., Henschel, P.H., and Hunter, L. 2015. Life after Cecil: channelling global outrage into funding for conservation in Africa. Conservation Letters Volume 9, Issue 4. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12224
Lindsay, P.A. et al. The performance of African protected areas for lion and their prey. Biological Conservation Volume 209, May 2017, Pages 137-149.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2017.01.011
Lindsay, P.A. et al. More than $1 billion needed annually to secure Africa’s protected areas with lions. PNAS November 6, 2018 115(45) E10788-E10796 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805048115
Natural Resources Committee. https://naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-releases/grijalva-introduces-cecil-act-to-limit-importation-of-lions-other-threatened-species-to-the-us_urges-bipartisan-action-against-destructive-trophy-hunts
The Independent, 28 April 2019. British hunters encouraged by killing of Cecil to shoot more big cats in South Africa’s deadly breeding farms. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/lions-canned-hunting-cecil-south-africa-trophy-imports-a8890316.html
US Fish and Wildlife Service.Service Proposes Endangered Species Act Protection for the African Lion. October 27, 2014. https://www.fws.gov/news/ShowNews.cfm?ID=5210BE7C-097B-7DF9-5FB6460921A8C4CE
Vaughan, Adam. France bans imports of lion hunt trophies.The Guardian, 19 November 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/19/france-bans-imports-of-lion-hunt-trophies