Countries fail to agree on complete ban to protect African lions from global trade

The 182 countries at the Johannesburg summit did reach a compromise banning only the trade in bones, teeth and claws from wild lions

Damian Carrington, Johannesburg

Sunday 2 October 2016 20.23 BST Last modified on Sunday 2 October 2016 23.55 BST

An attempt to ban all international trade in African lions, from trophy heads to bones, has failed at a global wildlife summit.

African lions have shrunk to just 8% of their historic range, with only 20,000 left in the wild. About 1,500 a year are hunted as trophies, a practice that attracted global attention last year after an American dentist killed Cecil the lion with a crossbow in Zimbabwe. 

A rising trade in lion bones to Asia, where such bones are replacing scarce tiger bones in supposed tonics, has raised fears of further declines. South Africa alone legally exported 1,200 skeletons – 11 tonnes of bones – between 2008 and 2011, the latest figures available.

But 182 countries at the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), meeting in Johannesburg, were unable to agree on a proposal from nine African countries to ban all international trade in lion parts.

Instead, a compromise agreement banned only the trade in bones, teeth and claws from wild lions. Those coming from captive-bred lions will still be legally sold, although South Africa will now have to report on how many it sells each year. The export of trophies from lion hunting remains legal.

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New ruling means US big game hunters won't be able to bring home African lion parts as trophies

Officials said the plan was in the offing long before Cecil the lion’s death

David Usborne

Monday 21 December 2015

It got a lot harder today for American big game hunters to bring lion trophies back home thanks to a new order to include African lions under special federal protection, a move at least partially inspired by the brouhaha that followed the killing in Zimbabwe of Cecil the lion five months ago by a Minnesota dentist.

The Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington for the first time designated lions from Central and West Africa as “endangered”, which will virtually prohibit hunters from shipping lion parts – whether a head, a paw or just a lion skin – back to the US. 

Lions from other parts of the continent are to be categorised as “threatened”. Shipping of their parts will be more strictly governed.

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US Regulators Move To List African Lions As A Threatened Species

28th October 2014

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

In the wake of research suggesting that African lions faced the danger of extinction due to increased conflicts with humans and the loss of both habitat and prey, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has proposed listing the iconic big cats as a threatened species.

According to Darryl Fears of the Washington Post, the proposal would make the African Lion the last of the big cats to receive federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, and comes as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports that their population has decreased by 30 percent over the past two decades.

“The African lion – a symbol of majesty, courage and strength – faces serious threats to its long-term survival,” FWS director Dan Ashe said in a statement Monday. “Listing it as a threatened species will bring the full protections of U.S. law to lion conservation, allowing us to strengthen enforcement and monitoring of imports and international trade.”

The agency explained that, in recent years, human settlements and agricultural activities had expanded into lion habitats and protected areas. Grazing activities have also spread into these areas, it said, putting more livestock in closer proximity to lions. With humans hunting the creatures’ prey base down to unsustainable levels, lions have been forced to kill more livestock, which in turn leads humans to kill them in retaliation and defense of their cattle.

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