News

Further opportunities for people like Sir David Scholey to hunt Zambian lions?

According to hunting operator Andrew Baldry, there was a message on Zambian national radio on Monday that trophy hunting will be reinstated. There does not seem to be confirmation in the Zambian national press.

You will remember that former Minister of Tourism and Arts, Sylvia Masebo, banned all hunting in January 2013. Her concerns were that hunting concession tenders were “irregularly” awarded and that Zambia’s wildlife was disappearing. She sacked the Zambian Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) Director General and reconstituted the ZAWA board.

Sylvia subsequently became embroiled in a court tribunal with political opponents for “exceeding her authority”. She won the court case, but was dismissed by President Sata for saying that she had his approval to act on a diversity of issues like getting rid of the ZAWA board.

No sooner had new Minister Jean Kapata been instated than she sacked Sylvia’s ZAWA board and the recently appointed Director General. Meanwhile ZAWA remains penniless and requires government bailouts to pay basic expenses.

ZAWA’s income was hugely dependent on leases of hunting concessions and trophy fees. Despite Zambia being a beautiful country with magnificent national parks, development of their photographic tourism industry has been very slow. That is to be regretted, and could have diversified ZAWA’s income base away from just trophy hunting.

Mr Baldry posted on a hunting forum that he was delighted by the radio announcement and was looking forward to resuming lion hunting. When LionAid met with former Minister Masebo in June 2013, she said any decision on the possibility of resurrecting lion hunting would be scientifically guided and informed by a survey of remaining lion populations. Sylvia was concerned as she had visited a diversity of national parks in her official capacity but had yet to see a lion.

ZAWA had been tossing numbers around like 4,000 lions in the country. When LionAid met with the ZAWA board in 2013 we questioned such estimates. We were told that Zambia had not yet adopted specific lion conservation policies called for by CITES and the IUCN. A diversity of NGOs and lion researchers are supposed to be involved in lion population surveys, but we have yet to see any results. Meanwhile, LionAid has cautioned that there might not even be 400 lions remaining in Zambia.

Mr Baldry states on the forum :

“Our Wildlife Department is shooting them [lions] on a regular basis... They are considered vermin and to be shot on sight.”

Other hunters’ contributions on the forum can be summed up by someone posting under the name “leopards valley safaris” who said “Great news Andrew! That's going to be a great victory for hunting conservation!”

We today made a series of telephone calls to very well-placed individuals in Zambia who meet regularly with the new Minister on these sorts of issues. They denied there was any announcement that hunting would resume. They assured us that Minister Kapata was carefully listening to all Zambians – where a strong grassroots conservation movement is gaining huge traction. Our Zambian sources also said that ZAWA had been engaged in only two human/lion conflict incidents this year, and that both lions were translocated. There is no irresponsible shooting of lions.

One of our sources even went so far as to say “the hunters are lying”.

At the end of the day we hope that the new board at ZAWA (due to be announced next week) will make good decisions with regard to the responsible conservation of Zambia’s wildlife heritage. And that Zambia’s Tourism Board will actively promote ecotourism visits to their stunning country.

Picture credit: http://bit.ly/1rf0vm6

If you have not already signed up to our mailing list, you can add your name here and keep up to date with our ongoing work and, most importantly, DONATE to support our work to conserve the remaining fragile lion populations. Thank you.