News

Zambia has just placed a moratorium on big cat (and maybe even all) trophy hunting for the near future. The trophy hunters are up in arms and are using their tired and outdated ammunition to fight this decision – communities will get no money, poaching will become rife without the “hunter protectors”, lions will decrease. But meanwhile the TRUTH is that Zambia set aside 21% of her land for trophy hunting, and the Minister said the total revenue from all this land was ONLY $3 million annually to the nation. A report by Bertrand Chardonnet for the IUCN mentioned that hunting income for each square kilometre of land in hunting concessions in Zambia amounted to $6 per year … the lowest income for any category of land use not only in Africa but also the world. Zambia now said tourism would earn more and indeed it will if Zambia will seek the grants and loans to invest in the infrastructure needed. The hunting community say much of this land is useless for tourism – but meanwhile the hunting concessions border directly on the national parks.

So the trophy hunter operators have failed to convince anyone. They have not had any effect on levels of poaching, they have not convinced the communities and governments, they have not conserved anything even though they were given many years, much land, and serious funding by donor programmes (CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe and ADMADE in Zambia for example) to attempt to prove their conservation formula. At the end of the day it has not worked.

Please support us if you can to conserve the remaining fragile lion populations. Thank you.