Poachers poisoned five lions and brutally mutilated one at a South African predator park this week. The horrific incident occurred on Monday night at Akwaaba Predator Park near Rustenburg, some 80 miles west of Johannesburg in the northeast of the country. 

Tourist attractions, trophies to be hunted and skeletons to be sold. This is what lions are used as in breeding facilities in South Africa, where they're not only mistreated but also endangered.

The impact of Kenya’s recent terrorist attack will be felt greatly by its tourism industry. Terrorism, and insecurity generally, is largelyresponsible for the sector’s poor performance over the last decade.

In the early hours of the morning, before the heat of the day sets in, a small team of field researchers opens the gates of their campsite and ventures into the heart of Kruger National Park. They will spend up to eight hours searching for lions.

This dedicated team is part of the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), and they are halfway through the second leg of their spatial capture-recapture survey. The aim is to determine how many lions there are inside Kruger Park. 

Last year, during the dry season, the team spent three months in northern Kruger, looking for lions, and this year, they are six weeks into their fieldwork in central Kruger.

 
Partnering with South African National Parks (SANParks) and the Lion Recovery Fund, the EWT uses GPS tracking technology to monitor the movements and habitat use of these majestic creatures. This research will culminate in a much-needed population estimate, the first since 2016, providing crucial data for conservation efforts.

“Understanding the population size is critical,” says Marnus Roodbol, EWT’s lion coordinator and senior field biologist. “It helps us know what we have, and what we need to protect.”

A day in the life
For these lion researchers, their day begins before 6am; after a quick breakfast, the team packs their essentials — snacks, cameras, tracking equipment — and sets off before first light. 

The team spends about four hours each morning driving through the park, covering predetermined routes, even ones where they don’t think lions would be (like areas with no water or prey), to avoid bias.

They rely on luck, knowledge of lion behaviour, and sometimes even tips from tourists and guides to locate these elusive predators. A few lions are collared, with the GPS on the collar pinging a lion’s location every few hours, but even then, much of the search comes down to being in the right place at the right time.

When they do spot a lion, the real work begins. The team meticulously photographs each lion’s face from both sides, focusing on the unique whisker spot pattern that serves as a lion’s fingerprint. After a midday break back at camp, they go through the images, cataloguing them and determining whether it’s a recapture or a new lion.

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“The densities are not super high here, so it makes finding them even more special when you do,” said Alison Govaerts, a PhD candidate at Stellenbosch University and co-lead of the EWT lion spatial capture-recapture survey.

Why do we need to know the population of lions?
Dr Sam Nicholson of the EWT explains that knowing the number of lions in the wild is essential for effective management and conservation. Population trends – whether stable, increasing, or declining – dictate the necessary interventions to protect these animals.

 
“Kruger is a stronghold for lions, with a healthy population,” explained Govaerts, who is collaborating with EWT because she’s using a lot of this data for her PhD thesis on lion movement behaviour and connectivity in Kruger National Park and the adjacent Limpopo National Park.

“However, even in large parks like Kruger, monitoring is vital. Lions are vulnerable to various threats, and it’s hard for their populations to recover from declines.”

Lions face numerous challenges, including human-wildlife conflict, habitat loss, and the impacts of climate change. With African lions classified as vulnerable, maintaining a healthy population in Kruger is crucial for the species’ survival. 

Threats to African lions
The threats to Africa’s lions are complex, often rooted in socio-political factors such as poverty, governance issues, and human pressures. 

The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area, which includes Kruger Park and adjacent protected areas in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, is one of the last strongholds for lions. However, even in these protected areas, dangers such as snaring bycatch and targeted poisonings are causing lion populations to decline.

Roodbol explained that the most significant threat to lions – which all fall under the umbrella of habitat loss on par with anthropogenic pressure – is snares and secondary poisoning. 

“Most lions in Southern Africa have been killed as bycatch, part of the illegal bushmeat consumption, which happens in protected areas,” said Roodbol. 

Dozens of snare lines are set for wild meat like wildebeest and impala in protected areas, and lions are drawn into the area because of rotting animals caught in a snare and which are not checked by those who laid them. Roodbol explained that only 20% of these snares are checked, leaving a significant risk for other animals.

Directed poaching is another threat, where snared animals are poisoned to either attract lions or other carnivores. And when the lions eat the carcass of the snared animal, they die from ingesting the poison.

“The amount of people actively hunting lions is very low,” Roodbol emphasised, explaining that the majority of people living on the border of Kruger are not involved in these practices and that many do not benefit from conservation.

 Are fenced lions happy?

Counting lions: The science behind the survey
Counting lions is no easy task. In a recent study, the EWT, in collaboration with other research institutions, reviewed various methods used across Africa to estimate lion populations. They found that spatially explicit capture-recapture analysis, which involves capturing and recapturing data through camera traps and direct observations, is the most reliable.

The EWT researchers spend three months in northern and central Kruger, but they rotate camps every two weeks and drive their mapped route multiple times to avoid bias and so the team can build a detailed picture of the lion population in Kruger.

Then their partners at the Lion Conservation Trust combine and input all the information received in a sophisticated computer model to calculate the probability of encountering a number of lions within an area. This determines, amongst other indicators, the home ranges of lion prides.

But what’s interesting about this technique is how researchers are able to identify individual lions to make sure they don’t count the same lion twice.

Using whisker patterns as fingerprints
Each lion has a unique whisker spot pattern on the top row of its cheeks, much like a human fingerprint. This method of identification, developed in the 1970s, allows researchers to track individual lions over time, contributing to more accurate population estimates.

“That’s how you identify lions, because they don’t have spots like leopards or wild dogs, so it’s really hard to tell them apart if they’re the same sex and age.”

When the EWT team finds a lion, they carefully photograph its whisker patterns from both the left and right sides. These images are then compared to previous sightings. If the lion is a new individual, it is added to the pride’s catalogue; if it’s a recapture, the data helps researchers understand the lion’s movements and behaviour.

The catalogue serves as a valuable tool for tracking the health and dynamics of lion populations in Kruger. Over time, it builds a detailed picture of each lion’s life, from its movements across the park to its interactions with other lions and its environment.

What keeps them going
“People might think it’s a bit boring, driving around and taking pictures of lions every day,” said Govearts.

“But it’s really necessary, because many charismatic animals from the African wild, even the lion, are classified as vulnerable.”

She added, “There are still communities here that have to live with lions and national parks on their doorsteps, so it’s important to study lions, but also include humans into the equation.”

“What’s scary is that I was in this camp when I was 12,” said Roodbol, speaking to Daily Maverick outside the gift shop at Mopani Camp after eight hours of driving, looking for lions. 

Roodbol recalls coming to this camp when it was first built with his family as a child – “there was strong wind, and my dad was braaing outside. And I used to be so scared — of lions, of everything. I was so scared I would sit with my chair against the wall,” he said.

“We heard a lion roaring super loudly that night, because of this wind.

“And I think to myself, if you take away that,” he said, motioning to the kids behind us who have come back from a game drive, “what’s the point?”

“Lions still scare me now, but I understand them. I’m so blessed to finish my career in the place that it started.” 

Reinet Meyer is the senior inspector at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the provincial city of Bloemfontein, located in the central grasslands of South Africa. In April, she received a tip: Two adult lions had been held for two days without food or water in tiny transport crates on a farm called Wag ‘n Bietjie (“Wait a While” in Afrikaans) about 20 miles outside the city.

I was shocked to read about the sudden closure of a well-known luxury safari operation in the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania. My dismay was not only because I personally know the owners of this wonderful operation and know what a terrible blow this must be to them.

he growing appetite for 'conservation holidays' has shone a light on the dark – and poorly regulated – industry of lion farming, where felines are destined not to be 'released into the wild' - but to be shot by trophy hunters and their bones exported to Asia for use in traditional medicine.

It is never pleasant to see wild animals caged and abused. A new report by the NGO World Animal Protection suggests that captive-breeding operations for lions and tigers have expanded to meet an increasing demand for big cat products used in traditional Asian medicine. While this is clearly bad news for the captive cats themselves, confined in often horrible conditions, we are not convinced by the report's findings on what this means for wild populations.

Animal welfare organisations often suggest that farming wild species will lead to an increased loss of animals from their natural habitats. Either this is because animals are taken from the wild to stock the farms, or because the sale of farmed products increases demand for the wild version, leading to more illegal killing (also known as "poaching").

For instance, the new report found anecdotal evidence that wild lionesses were sometimes killed in order to capture their cubs and smuggle them into captive facilities to diversify the gene pool and reduce inbreeding problems. World Animal Protection suggests that by "sustaining demand for [big cat] products" these farming operations are "exacerbating the decline" of big cats in the wild.

However, we argue there is insufficient data to prove that overall poaching of lions or tigers has increased specifically because of these farming operations. Even if poaching has increased since farming operations have expanded, there's not yet been a cause-effect mechanism found to prove that farming has contributed to an increase in poaching. To understand this conundrum, we would need to look at the counterfactual: with all other things being equal, what happens to overall poaching numbers when there is or is not farming?

One study that looked at the impact of South Africa's lion farms found that the trade had negligible effects on wild lion populations. Another report found that seizures of illegal tiger parts were increasing, but attributed it to expanding tiger farm operations (so more supply flowing in the illegal trade) rather than increased poaching of wild tigers. It is also not clear if an increase in enforcement effort could partly explain this increase in seizures reported. Again, to really understand a cause-effect relationship, we need more (and better) data.

Taking the pressure off

In some instances, farming of wild animals has helped to reduce poaching. Crocodiles for instance were once regularly hunted for their hide and meat. The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation then provided assistance to set up crocodile farming operations, which took the pressure off wild populations.

There is, however, one large difference between the crocodile trade and the big cat trade: many consumers of big cat parts say they prefer wild-caught individuals, whereas purchasers of crocodile leather products prefer farmed, as you generally get better quality hides. But people who say that they prefer wild animal products may not always then go on to buy them in real life, especially if it's easier, cheaper or more legal to buy from farms. To suggest that farming big cats increases poaching potentially is misleading without providing firm evidence that poaching of wild animals will decline without the farms.

Though some may argue for the precautionary principle (that is, ban everything then work out what the best approach is), until we know more, closing these farming operations may have the unintended consequence of actually increasing the poaching of wild animals. In examples like the lion and tiger trade where farming already exists, we must first understand and tackle demand for these products before bans are put in place, to ensure we do not accidentally increase pressure on wild animals.

It is tempting to act swiftly due to the widespread and alarming decline of biodiversity. However, we caution against rushed actions that, while well meaning, may not be based on firm evidence and could end up creating worse problems. What we really need first is better data on how captive-bred farming affects wild animal populations. The conditions for individual animals on many of these farms may be abhorrent, but if the main goal is to conserve wild species, we must act on science rather than emotion.

 Vusamazulu

“If you can visualise hell on earth,” said the indigenous healer in the black and red cloth, “that is what our governing structures have created with the king of all animals.”

Many big cat cubs that are exhibited and petted at wildlife facilities end up being killed as a result of canned hunting.

Thirty-four lions were crammed into a muddy enclosure meant for three.

Evidence is emerging of the growing threat to wild lion populations of targeted poaching for lion body parts – teeth and claws.

Scientists have conducted one of the world’s first studies into the entire genome sequence of lions to reveal the evolutionary history of living and extinct lion species.

Lion, jaguar and leopard body parts are being increasingly sought as substitutes to tiger products by traffickers, a major UN report has found, but demand for ivory and rhino horn has shown signs of a sustained fall.

Human-lion conflict is a major issue for the conservation of wild lions. The Zambezi Region (formerly the Caprivi) is a small strip of land that fits like a Namibian key in a lock made of four other countries – Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. This strip of land is near the centre of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA).

There are an estimated 12,000 captive lions in the country, while fewer than 10,000 wild lions roam the continent.

Today at a stakeholder’s feedback meeting in Pretoria, Minister Creecy of the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) took crucial and long-awaited steps towards changing the status quo of the commercial captive lion breeding industry in South Africa.

In the recent report provided by the High-Level Panel on the management of iconic wildlife species in South Africa, the majority of the panel recommended that the government of South Africa ban captive lion breeding.

A lion called Mopane was shot by a bowhunter on 5 August 2021 on a hunting concession bordering the unfenced Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. He was 12 years old and a breeding pride male.

A large nomad lion has settled in the remote Zinave National Park, Mozambique, and there is evidence that a lioness has joined him. This extraordinary story of Africa’s apex predator recolonizing a former range is being  hailed as a conservation success story.