Remember Cecil
It was the shot heard around the world. On July 1, 2015, American dentist Walter Palmer earned global notoriety after he hunted and illegally killed Zimbabwe’s famous Cecil the lion.
The worldwide media attention and outrage triggered by Cecil’s death helped raise awareness of the plight of lions, which face an uncertain future despite their iconic nature. Today an estimated 20,000 lions remain in all of Africa, down from half a million 200 years ago, and research suggests the number could be halved in another 20 years.
The precipitous decline had mostly gone unnoticed by the world before Cecil. “Cecil’s legacy is the massive attention it raised to the lions’ plight across Africa,” said Luke Hunter, president of Panthera, the big-cat conservation organization. “That, to me, was a real sea-change moment.”
Hunter said lions were “off the conservation radar” before Cecil because the big cats are most visible in the few places where they are doing well: highly protected areas such as the African parks and safaris that are popular with tourists from around the world. “I think that created this perception that lions were not really in a dire conservation need,” he said. “But it actually turns out that they are.”
That’s starting to change, thanks to Cecil, and conservationists say the increased awareness has been a benefit to lions in a few small ways. “I think that Cecil has shone a very, very bright spotlight on the murky world of the trophy-hunting industry,” said Pieter Kat, director of LionAid. He pointed to a recent report by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives that found that trophy hunting offers little to no conservation value, and also to the fact that dozens of airlines have banned shipments of wildlife trophies in the wake of Cecil’s death.
Cecil also appears to have played a role in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s move to add lions to the endangered species list earlier this year, which included the imposition of strict rules on the import of lion trophies into the country. “That was initiated many years prior to Cecil’s death,” said Hunter, who thinks the enormous public outcry over the famous feline accelerated efforts to protect lions under the Endangered Species Act.
But have these positive steps helped lions? The answer appears to be no. “The reality is that very little has changed,” Hunter said. “Trophy hunting hasn’t been banned anywhere in Africa as a result of the Cecil furor, and no fewer lions are legally trophy hunted as a result of Cecil.” He calls the steps taken by governments in countries including Australia and the Netherlands to ban trophy imports “token efforts” that have had little impact. [...]
This article can be found in Take Part Daily
Author: unknown
The worldwide media attention and outrage triggered by Cecil’s death helped raise awareness of the plight of lions, which face an uncertain future despite their iconic nature. Today an estimated 20,000 lions remain in all of Africa, down from half a million 200 years ago, and research suggests the number could be halved in another 20 years.
The precipitous decline had mostly gone unnoticed by the world before Cecil. “Cecil’s legacy is the massive attention it raised to the lions’ plight across Africa,” said Luke Hunter, president of Panthera, the big-cat conservation organization. “That, to me, was a real sea-change moment.”
Hunter said lions were “off the conservation radar” before Cecil because the big cats are most visible in the few places where they are doing well: highly protected areas such as the African parks and safaris that are popular with tourists from around the world. “I think that created this perception that lions were not really in a dire conservation need,” he said. “But it actually turns out that they are.”
That’s starting to change, thanks to Cecil, and conservationists say the increased awareness has been a benefit to lions in a few small ways. “I think that Cecil has shone a very, very bright spotlight on the murky world of the trophy-hunting industry,” said Pieter Kat, director of LionAid. He pointed to a recent report by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives that found that trophy hunting offers little to no conservation value, and also to the fact that dozens of airlines have banned shipments of wildlife trophies in the wake of Cecil’s death.
Cecil also appears to have played a role in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s move to add lions to the endangered species list earlier this year, which included the imposition of strict rules on the import of lion trophies into the country. “That was initiated many years prior to Cecil’s death,” said Hunter, who thinks the enormous public outcry over the famous feline accelerated efforts to protect lions under the Endangered Species Act.
But have these positive steps helped lions? The answer appears to be no. “The reality is that very little has changed,” Hunter said. “Trophy hunting hasn’t been banned anywhere in Africa as a result of the Cecil furor, and no fewer lions are legally trophy hunted as a result of Cecil.” He calls the steps taken by governments in countries including Australia and the Netherlands to ban trophy imports “token efforts” that have had little impact. [...]
This article can be found in Take Part Daily
Author: unknown
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