Hmm? Trophy hunting contributes $426 million dollars to eight, mostly poor, sub-Saharan African countries (including Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa - the only countries to buck the trend and which together are home to almost a third of the continent’s lions) and employs 53,000 people. Perhaps LionAid, Born Free, Dereck and Beverly Joubert's Big Cats Initiative, ZCTF, etc. will provide the funds needed to save Panthera leo?

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A Year After Cecil, $1.25 Billion a Year Needed to Save the Lion (article written by Kevin Crowley and published by Bloomberg on June 30, 2016)

- Just 20,000 lions left in Africa, 43% drop in two decades
- Human-lion conflict the biggest threat to populations

Africa needs an annual budget of at least $1.25 billion to save the lion, conservationists said, a year after the killing of a Zimbabwean cat named Cecil provoked global outrage.

The money is required to protect lions’ natural habitat from human encroachment, the most effective way of maintaining populations, Panthera, WildAid and the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, known as WildCru, said in a report published Thursday. Cecil, a 13-year-old lion whose black mane made him popular with tourists, was being monitored by WildCru when he was illegally killed by U.S. hunter Walter Palmer in July 2015.

“The future of the lion in Africa hangs in the balance,” the groups said. “Although there is a scattering of populations that are probably secure for the long term, many more are under extreme pressure and will disappear without concerted conservation action.”

Cecil’s death prompted an outpouring of sympathy and anger as it exposed the scale of Africa’s trophy hunting industry. Governments including those in the U.S., France, the Netherlands and Australia tightened restrictions on importing trophies from animals that had been hunted. United Airlines and Delta Air Lines Inc. joined airlines including Emirates and Deutsche Lufthansa AG in banning customers from transporting big-game hunting trophies as cargo.

There are 20,000 lions left in Africa, a 43 percent decline in the past two decades, and just six countries host populations with more than 1,000 animals, the groups said in their report. The only countries to buck the trend are Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, which together are home to almost a third of the continent’s lions. The cats are confined to 8 percent of their historical habitat.

‘Cecil Summit’

WildCru and Panthera will hold a “Cecil Summit” in September to work out how much of the $1.25 billion a year is already funded and what portion needs to be raised.

While the hunting industry needs to be reformed, it’s “a relatively small factor contributing to the lion’s current status,” the three groups said. Humans encroaching on lions’ territory and killing them to protect livestock is a much bigger threat.

The increase in locals hunting for so-called bushmeat as a cheap source of protein is also a major threat. The killings reduce the amount of prey available and lions often get caught in traps set for animals such as wildebeest and zebra, according to the three organizations. Hunting can play a role in preserving habitat and giving lions an economic value, but quotas are often too high and revenues fail to benefit local communities, they said.

Hunters have hit back at criticism, saying the industry is a major contributor to conservation and communities. The conservation arm of Safari Club International, which suspended the membership of Palmer, a Minnesota dentist, for shooting Cecil, said earlier this month that trophy hunting contributes $426 million dollars to eight, mostly poor, sub-Saharan African countries and employs 53,000 people.

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Welcome to the new Southern Africa where no good deed goes unpunished.

http://www.letlionslive.org/LionReport.pdf


Here is the lion report.

Another good article written by Richard Conniff and published by The New York Times on July 01, 2016.

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Title: Angry Tweets Won’t Help African Lions

THE killing of Zimbabwe’s celebrated Cecil the Lion by a Minnesota dentist, on July 1 of last year unleashed a storm of moral fulmination against trophy hunting. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals issued an official statement calling for the hunter, Walter J. Palmer, to be hanged, and an odd bedfellow, Newt Gingrich, tweeted that Dr. Palmer and the entire team involved in the killing of Cecil should go to jail. The television personality Sharon Osbourne thought merely losing “his home, his practice and his money” would do, adding, “He has already lost his soul.”

More than one million people signed a petition demanding “justice for Cecil,” and three major American airlines announced that they would no longer transport hunting trophies. A few months later, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service listed lions from West and Central Africa and also India as endangered, shutting down the major markets for trophies from that region. Australia, France and the Netherlands banned lion trophy imports outright.

Unfortunately, the furor did almost nothing to slow the catastrophic decline in lion populations, down 43 percent over the past two decades. That’s because trophy hunting was never really the main problem. Lions are disappearing in Africa for a reason far more complicated and less susceptible to either moral grandstanding or easy solutions: Impoverished Africans are eating the lions’ prey and killing the lions themselves — at a rate estimated at five to 10 times the take from trophy hunting.

In West and Central Africa in particular, the killing now takes place almost entirely within national parks and other ostensibly protected areas. Poachers and bushmeat hunters have already stripped wildlife from the remaining unprotected habitat, leaving empty forests. Now many protected areas have also lost the buffalo, antelope and other large animals that lions would normally feed on, according to Philipp Henschel, a lion specialist with the cat conservation group Panthera. In many habitats, only warthogs and baboons survive, because of Muslim rules against eating them. Herders also capture and kill lions, using leg hold traps made from old car springs. They do this not just to protect livestock, but also to sell lion bones to the Asian traditional medicine trade.

As a result, lions are now effectively extinct across much of West and Central Africa; two populations, totaling about 400, remain. Continent wide, only about 20,000 lions survive, according to a new report, “Beyond Cecil: Africa’s Lions in Crisis,” just issued by Panthera and another conservation group, WildAid. That’s down from 200,000 in the mid-20th century, and the number is likely to drop to 10,000 over the next decade.

Africa without lions? It is unthinkable. But angry tweets are not really much of an answer. So where do we go with our outrage?

The first step in making sure that doesn’t happen may seem obvious to us, but less so to Africans struggling to feed their families: Set aside and truly protect part of each country as wildlife habitat. This is not just common sense, it’s also a survival strategy for both lions and humans, especially as Africa’s population quadruples in this century to four billion people.

Forests and other natural habitats produce oxygen, help prevent both drought and flooding, refill aquifers and serve as a living gene bank for agricultural improvement, among many other benefits. They can become the basis for jobs in tourism economies and provide essential resources, including a sustainable harvest of firewood, medicine and even meat for nearby communities — but only if somebody is protecting the habitat from the heedless human urge to consume everything right now.

And that’s not happening. For example, Zambia’s Kafue National Park, an area the size of Massachusetts, loses much of its wildlife to snaring — and generates just $2.3 million a year from tourism. With adequate anti-poaching patrols and upgraded facilities, a recent analysis by conservation and development consultant Rowan Martin suggests, the park could be making $39 million a year instead, along with jobs and benefits for its neighbors — and support four times as many lions.

Unfortunately, only a few countries in Africa have the tax base or the political will to maintain and patrol protected areas effectively. According to a report published in January by a team of Panthera scientists, many allocate just $100 per square kilometer, a fraction of the $500 to $2,000 required. Properly managed trophy hunting can help in some areas, but generates only $138 to $1,100 per square kilometer — and much less after the hunting guide takes a share. Tourism might close the gap, but it tends to concentrate on a few spectacular sites like the Serengeti and Kruger National Park.

The “Beyond Cecil” report argues that, moving past the disproportionate focus on trophy hunting after Cecil’s death, the single most important step in securing the future of the lion in Africa “is mobilizing massive support” for Africa’s parks and protected areas. That is, we should be lobbying the United Nations, the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, the European Union, the International Development Bank and other international bodies to take on the park management shortfall, estimated at $700 million to $3 billion a year.

This money needs to go to anti-poaching patrols in protected areas, but with the transparency and policing to insure it does not dwindle like past funding efforts under the guidance of Western consultants and corrupt African governments.

Some of that money should also go to develop alternatives to bushmeat, to reduce conflict with wildlife (for instance, by building better nighttime corrals) and to compensate livestock herders for the burden of living with lions and other dangerous animals. In one area, outside a national park in Niger, where per capita income is under $500, the loss of livestock to lions costs $138 per person every year — hardly a recipe for tolerance. People living around protected areas need to see practical benefits to living with wildlife.

This ought to be a campaign that unites animal rights activists and trophy hunters alike. Both have a material and emotional interest when, as the “Beyond Cecil” report notes, more than 1,400 prey animals have suffered slow, painful deaths in snares and been left to rot in just one Zimbabwe conservancy. Their scent attracts lions and other predators, which also end up snared, to be “choked, succumb to injuries, or die of thirst.”

In truth, it is a campaign that ought to unite all of us who want some vestige of wild Africa — one with lions, elephants, rhinos — to survive beyond our meager lifetimes. Never mind Walter Palmer’s soul. If we do nothing but point fingers, it is our own souls we should be worrying about.

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Welcome to the new Southern Africa where no good deed goes unpunished!

He would do well to come and have a look at my project. We are currently looking at changing policy here that will double/treble incomes into the attached community and completely address USF&W concerns regarding sustainability and community benefits.

quote:

Originally posted by fairgame:
He would do well to come and have a look at my project. We are currently looking at changing policy here that will double/treble incomes into the attached community and completely address USF&W concerns regarding sustainability and community benefits.

Good luck with your ongoing efforts my friend.

In response to the report jointly published (see Ms. Kathi's posting) by Panthera, WildAid, and WildCRU, our friends at LionAid posted the following on their website:

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Excerpt #1:

But let’s have a look at the organisations behind this report. The Panthera Foundation is a staunch supporter of lion trophy hunting as a conservation measure and OPPOSED the US listing of lion on their Endangered Species Act . It would seem that now that the USFWS has listed the lion, Luke Hunter and Panthera have amended their opposition and in the report now seem to refer to the USFWS decision in glowing terms. Oxford University are also supporters of lion trophy hunting as a conservation measure. WildAid is an organization attempting to reduce the illegal trade of shark fins, ivory and rhino horn, but has not until now dipped their toe into lion conservation.

Excerpt #2:

Ensure that communities living with lions do not suffer negative consequences. On Page 19, Panthera mentions that one of their community schemes has paid dividends. Many similar programmes are operating in Africa and most are starved of funding. The UK Government, for example, turned down a cost effective and sustainable LionAid programme developed in collaboration with Maasai communities in Kenya on a technicality – LionAid did not have sufficient financial reserves (a few hundred thousand or so in bank account) to qualify for an award, despite all scientific and technical requirements having been met and exceeded.

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Regarding Excerpt #1: LionAid, from your perspective, apparently WildAid is not qualified to participate in a report related to lion conservation since their expertise is illegal trade of shark fins, ivory and rhino horn. However, your organization (that focuses on lion conservation - ?) is qualified (from your perspective) to "dip it's toe" into the Florida bear hunting controversy. Hmm?

Regarding Excerpt #2: LionAid, so instead of soliciting funds from the hard working British taxpayers, why don't you solicit funds from your 18,170 Facebook followers? If I recall correctly, flashing Christmas lights (to install at the Maasai cattle kraals) are relatively inexpensive. Perhaps it's time for your Facebook followers to "walk the walk". Hmm?

Welcome to the new Southern Africa where no good deed goes unpunished.