Lion Aid

21/08/2026

https://lionaid.org/a-leopard-dies-in-a-snare-on-
The trap doesn’t choose: a leopard dies in a snare on the Kwando

Along the Kwando River in Namibia’s Zambezi region, a snare was set in the shallows to catch a crocodile. It caught a leopard instead. The animal was found dead at the water’s edge, killed by a wire meant for something else entirely.

In one sense it is a small story: a single leopard, one strand of wire, on one bend of one African river. But it captures, in the cruellest way, everything that is wrong with snaring as a way of killing. A snare does not choose its victim. It cannot tell a crocodile from a leopard, a duiker from a lion, a bushpig from a wild dog. It simply waits, and it takes whatever comes to it.

Why snares are so devastating

Wire snares are the most common poaching tool across Africa, and among the most destructive. They are cheap, silent, quick to set and almost invisible once in place. A length of wire or cable, a loop, an anchor point, and the trap is ready. Most are set for bushmeat, for antelope and other animals that can be eaten or sold. But the wire has no way of knowing what it holds.

The result is a huge and largely hidden toll of what researchers politely call “bycatch”: the wrong animals, caught by accident, dying slowly and for nothing. Leopards, lions, cheetahs, spotted hyenas and endangered African wild dogs are all regularly killed or maimed this way. A snared cat that pulls free often carries the wire with it, biting into a leg or neck for weeks until infection finishes the job. Many are never found, never counted, never known.

A river that should be a stronghold

The Kwando rises in Angola and flows for some 300 kilometres through the Zambezi region, one of the great wildlife corridors of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, the largest such protected landscape on Earth. This is exactly the sort of place where lions, leopards and wild dogs should be able to move, hunt and breed safely across borders. That a leopard can die here, in a snare set for a crocodile, shows how far the reach of a single strand of wire extends into even our best wild places.

Leopards, quietly disappearing

Leopards are so adaptable, so secretive and so seemingly widespread that people assume they are doing fine. They are not. Across much of Africa their range has shrunk dramatically, squeezed by habitat loss, the trade in skins and body parts, conflict with livestock farmers, and the constant, indiscriminate pressure of snaring. Because leopards are solitary and shy, their losses are rarely witnessed. A death like this one is the exception: usually the wire does its work unseen.

What has to change

None of this is hopeless. Snaring can be pushed back where there is the will and the funding to do it: regular snare-sweep patrols that comb the bush and the riverbanks for wire, support for the community game guards who do that walking, and honest work on the reasons people set snares in the first place, from poverty to the need for protein. Every snare lifted is an animal that does not die in it.

At LionAid we keep saying it because it stays true: Africa’s big cats are being lost not only to the dramatic, headline crimes but to the quiet, everyday ones. A wire in the mud on a beautiful river is as much a part of the extinction story as any rifle. This leopard’s death should not pass unmarked. The least we can do is name what killed it, and refuse to look away.

Image: an African leopard in Kruger National Park, South Africa (illustrative, not the animal in this report). Photo: Derek Keats, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, resized.

21/08/2026

12/08/2026

France bans hunting trophy imports from threatened species

France has just done something the United Kingdom has been promising for years.

With immediate effect, France has stopped processing import permits for hunting trophies of threatened species and committed to a total ban on those imports. The decision comes from the French Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, dated 28 July 2026. On 31 July, Mathieu Lefèvre, the Minister Delegate for Ecological Transition, instructed France’s nature and CITES authorities to apply it at once, across the whole country, without waiting for every last regulation to be rewritten.

In plain language: French hunters can no longer bring home the heads, skins and bodies of threatened animals as souvenirs. The road here was not simple. A draft law was submitted in 2023 and, in January 2024, discussed in parliamentary committee, where it was adopted by a near-unanimous vote: a form of consultation in itself. It was then scheduled for a vote in parliament, but that was cancelled when the National Assembly was dissolved. In 2025 one bill was submitted to parliament and another to the Senate, but a heavy legislative backlog made it almost impossible to schedule a debate. In the end the government acted directly.

What the instruction actually says
The official letter is short and clear. It covers hunting trophies of species listed under EU wildlife trade rules in Annex A, and further threatened species in Annex B (XIII) for which an import permit is already required. Competent services are told not to process those permit applications any longer. Until the full legal text is finished, the orientation is to be applied without delay and uniformly.

That is how serious policy looks when a government means it: one decision, one signature, and the permits stop.

France already banned lion trophy imports after the killing of Cecil in 2015. It was done the same way: a minister’s decision, by the then minister Ségolène Royal. This created the precedent now being used again. This time it goes much further, reaching elephants, leopards, hippos and other threatened mammals that still appear in European trophy import statistics, not only lions.

Why it matters
Between 2015 and 2024, France imported 827 hunting trophies from CITES-listed mammal species. Across the same period, the European Union as a whole imported more than 27,000 such trophies. After the United States, the EU is the world’s second-largest destination market for hunting trophies of mammals already recognised as of conservation concern.

Those numbers are not abstract. Every “personal trophy” is an animal that was shot so someone could display it. For species already under pressure from habitat loss, human conflict and commercial trade, that demand is a luxury the wild cannot afford.

Public opinion in France is not ambiguous either. Polling has shown around nine in ten French people support a ban on imports of trophies of endangered species (IFOP, 2023). The government has finally caught up with its own citizens.

And the United Kingdom?
Here is the uncomfortable comparison.

The UK has debated a hunting-trophy import ban for years. A private member’s bill made real progress and then stalled. Ministers have spoken warmly about ending the trade. Permits for trophies of threatened species have continued. We have written about this many times, including why the government is still stalling and why the door must finally shut.

France has shown that the obstacle is not technical difficulty. It is political will. If Paris can instruct its CITES services to stop the paper trail tomorrow, London can do the same.

We will be taking this directly to the UK Government. The French decision puts our own ministers on the spot. Being “out of touch” is no longer a debating point; it is now visible against a neighbour who has simply acted.

What needs to happen next
In France: the full text finalised as an official order (not a law), with tight definitions and no quiet exemptions for “personal effects” or special cases.
In the UK: a government bill with parliamentary time, not another warm promise that dies in procedure.
In the EU: an EU-wide ban, so hunters cannot simply shop around for a more permissive Member State. The European Parliament already called for this in 2022; national action like France’s makes the case harder to ignore.
Trophy hunting is sold as conservation. The evidence, and the animals themselves, say otherwise. Ending the import market is one of the cleanest levers consuming countries have. France has pulled it. Britain should follow, without another decade of delay.

If you want to help us keep the pressure on, please share this post and, if you can, support LionAid’s work. We will keep putting the case for wild lions, and for every other threatened species treated as a wall decoration, until the law catches up with common decency. https://lionaid.org/donate/

Thank you, as always, for standing with the lions, and for keeping the pressure on until the law catches up.

With warmest wishes from all at LionAid

Picture credit: Martin Fowkes

10/08/2026

World Lion Day: The King of Beasts Is Running Out of Time

Today, on World Lion Day, there’s a hard truth worth sitting with: the animal we’ve turned into a symbol of strength and courage on flags, crests, and logos across the globe is disappearing from the wild at an alarming rate — and much of the world still isn’t paying attention.

The Numbers Are Worse Than Most People Realise

According to LionAid’s most recent continent-wide assessment, a comprehensive synthesis of wild lion numbers across Africa’s range states, just 13,014 lions remain in eastern and southern Africa, with a further 342 in western and central Africa — a combined total of roughly 13,356 wild lions left on the entire continent. That western and central African figure is itself a steep decline from the charity’s previous estimate of 410 lions in the region, underlining just how fast these genetically distinct populations are vanishing.

Put that in perspective: Africa is estimated to have had around 200,000 lions a century ago, and even a decade ago estimates hovered around 30,000. Lions now survive in only a handful of countries, and are considered highly vulnerable in around a quarter of the nations where they’re still found at all. This isn’t a slow decline — it’s a collapse happening largely out of public view, masked by the fact that lions remain highly visible in tourist hotspots and zoos, creating a false sense that all is well.

The UK Still Hasn’t Banned Lion Trophy Imports

Here’s the part that should make British readers uncomfortable: despite years of campaigning by LionAid and other conservation groups, the UK still has not banned the import of lion trophies.

This isn’t for lack of trying, or even lack of political promises. A ban on hunting trophy imports has been a manifesto commitment under two different UK governments. Conservative MP Henry Smith’s Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill passed through the House of Commons with cross-party support, only to be blocked by a filibuster in the House of Lords. Since then, further attempts — including a bill from Labour MP John Spellar and, more recently, one from David Reed MP — have repeatedly stalled or been delayed.

Along the way, the campaign has faced pushback dressed up as principle: claims that a ban would amount to “neo-colonial” interference in African nations’ affairs, and even direct lobbying from the US government against the legislation. LionAid and others have consistently pushed back on this framing, pointing out that countries regulate what crosses their borders all the time, and that the actual conservation benefits claimed for trophy hunting rarely stand up to scrutiny.

The result is that, more than a decade after this was first promised, British hunters can still legally bring home lion heads, skins, and other body parts as trophies.

A Petition That Refuses to Be Ignored

Since 2019, LionAid has been running a change.org petition calling on the UK government to ban lion trophy hunting imports. Seven years on, that petition has now passed over 910,000 signatures — a staggering show of public support that stands in sharp contrast to the political inertia in Westminster.

That’s nearly a million people who’ve taken the time to add their name and say, in effect, that they don’t want the UK to be part of a trade in the body parts of an animal that may not survive this century in the wild. If you haven’t signed it yet, today — World Lion Day — is as good a day as any. https://www.change.org/p/ban-lion-trophy-hunting-imports-into-the-uk

What This Day Should Really Be About

World Lion Day isn’t just an excuse to post a nice photo of a lion on social media. With barely over 13,000 lions left across the whole of Africa, and legislation that could remove one small but symbolic driver of their decline still stuck in political limbo nearly a decade after it was first promised, this is a moment to ask what we’re actually willing to do about it.

Signing a petition won’t save lions on its own. But nearly a million signatures on a single petition is exactly the kind of pressure that eventually turns promises into policy — if the politicians in question stop finding reasons to look away.
Picture credit: Martin Fowkes

https://lionaid.org/world-lion-day-the-king-of-beasts-is-running-out-of-time/

19/07/2026

Four years ago this weekend, the incredible Lion Hearts 11 person team began the successful climb of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania to raise money for the LionAid Human/Wildlife Conflict Mitigation project in Merrueshi, Kenya.
The wonderful Peter Haygarth recorded our epic climb. You can watch the video he made below.

We are still raising money to continue the Merrueshi project. Climbing Kilimanjaro gave us the funds to start this amazing initiative and we have doubtlessly already saved many lions and other predators and enriched very many lives of rural families living alongside these awesome predators.

We need to keep fundraising to expand this successful project within the Merrueshi ecosystem.
Thank you for your support!

LionAid Charity climb of Mount Kilimanjaro in 2022

15/06/2026

Roger Cook — A Voice for the Voiceless
6th April 1943 – 13th June 2026

LionAid mourns the passing of Roger Cook, the fearless investigative journalist who dedicated his career to holding the powerful and corrupt to account.

Born in New Zealand, Roger became one of Britain's most celebrated broadcast journalists, credited with pioneering the "doorstep" interview technique and bringing some of the world's darkest secrets into the living rooms of millions. His landmark ITV programme, The Cook Report, ran for 16 series and more than 120 episodes, attracting audiences of up to 12 million viewers — making it the most-watched current affairs programme on British television.

Among his many courageous investigations, Roger was the first journalist to shine a global spotlight on the hideous canned lion hunting industry in South Africa — bringing this cruel and shameful practice to the world's attention at a time when few dared to speak of it. It was a story that aligned closely with LionAid's own mission, and one that helped lay the groundwork for growing international outrage against trophy hunting.

This is what Roger wrote for us in March 2014, just before our Global March for Lions:

“So-called ‘canned hunting’ involves unfairly preventing the target animal from escaping the hunter, thereby eliminating ‘fair chase’ and guaranteeing the hunter a trophy – for which he will have paid up to £25,000. The hapless animal is handicapped either by being confined to a small enclosure or because it has lost its fear of humans as a result of hand-rearing. Some are even tranquilised, as the Cook Report found in South Africa when it brought this ghastly trade to public attention in 1997.
After the programme, the Mandela government outlawed the practice, but this enlightened change in the law was successfully challenged under succeeding administrations by the influential Predator Breeders Association – and is now both legal and flourishing. There are fewer than 3000 lions left in the ’wild’ in South Africa, but more than 8,000 in captivity, being bred – like grouse – exclusively to be shot. What’s more, some of the volunteers who have paid to help raise them have been deliberately misled into believing that they are helping conservation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is a multi-million pound industry, founded on cruelty and fuelled by money. It is certainly not a sport. The South African Government needs to be persuaded to close it down, once and for all. By marching today you are helping to achieve that aim. I wish I could have been with you.”

ITV paid tribute, saying Cook "worked tirelessly to expose criminal wrongdoing and injustice, helping to drive important and lasting changes in the law," adding that "his fearless contribution to journalism will long be remembered."

He was awarded a BAFTA special award for 25 years of outstanding quality investigative reporting.

LionAid extends its deepest condolences to Roger's family. He was a rare breed — a journalist who understood that sometimes the most important stories are the ones nobody wants told. Lions, and those who fight for them, have lost a true friend.

https://lionaid.org/news/2026/06/roger-cook-a-voice-for-the-voiceless.htm

09/06/2026

At least 30 vultures have died near Phuduhudu Village, neighbouring Nxai Pan National Park in Botswana, after feeding on a poisoned zebra carcass, according to Safari360 Botswana. The Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) is investigating. The poison was almost certainly placed to kill predators — lions, leopards, or hyenas preying on local livestock. The vultures paid the price instead.

A Pattern with Devastating Consequences

This is not an isolated incident. It is the latest in a long line of poisoning events that have pushed Africa’s vultures toward the brink. ( https://lionaid.org/news/2011/06/dead-vultures.htm ) Around 60% of African vulture deaths are attributed to poisoning, and six of the continent’s eleven vulture species are now critically endangered. What is lost in minutes can take decades to recover — vultures raise just one chick a year, meaning a single event like this sets populations back by a generation.

Botswana has been here before. In June 2019, 537 vultures were poisoned near Chobe after poachers laced elephant carcasses with chemicals. In November 2022, 43 white-backed vultures were found dead after feeding on a poisoned zebra — the same scenario playing out again near Phuduhudu today. Across the continent, the scale is frequently catastrophic: a single poisoned carcass in South Africa’s Kruger National Park in May 2025 killed 123 vultures outright.

The LionAid Connection — and a Blueprint for Change

LionAid, the UK lion conservation charity, has long highlighted how poisoning predators rarely ends with the intended target. Vulture deaths and lion deaths are two sides of the same coin, and LionAid is doing something practical about it.

Our Merrueshi Human/Lion Conflict Mitigation Project in Kenya, bordering Amboseli National Park, ( https://lionaid.org/news/2024/05/lionaids-merrueshi-maasai-community-project-exceeds-all-expectations.htm ) offers a powerful model. The Merrueshi ecosystem comprises 58 Maasai villages whose livestock are highly vulnerable to predation by lions and other carnivores. Historically, every predation incident triggered retaliatory killings — a lose-lose cycle destroying both wildlife and community livelihoods.

LionAid’s solution, designed together with the Maasai themselves, centres on something beautifully simple: lights. Blinking solar-powered lights are fitted around the perimeter fences of villages to deter predators, dramatically reducing livestock losses. In return, households donate livestock to a community insurance herd, administered by village Elders, which compensates any family that does suffer a predation loss. Crucially, LionAid also installs solar household lights inside each home — many of which had never had any light after dark. Children can read their schoolbooks at night for the first time. Families feel safer. The association between protecting lions and tangible improvements in daily life begins to take hold.

LionAid has already equipped six manyattas with this system, with overwhelmingly positive feedback from communities. The reduction in retaliatory killings — of lions, predators, and the vultures that inevitably become collateral victims — is the direct result.

This is exactly the kind of proven, community-centred approach that is needed near Phuduhudu and across Botswana.

What Must Change

The DWNP investigation must lead to accountability. But beyond that, this incident is a reminder that wildlife poisoning will continue as long as communities living alongside predators have no meaningful safety net. LionAid’s Merrueshi initiative proves that with the right support, people and predators can coexist — and that protecting one means protecting the other.

Thirty vultures are dead near Nxai Pan. They were doing exactly what nature designed them to do. The crisis that killed them is entirely preventable.

https://lionaid.org/news/2026/06/poisoned-zebra-carcass-kills-at-least-30-vultures-near-botswanas-nxai-pan.htm

04/06/2026

Botswana’s Elephants: Killed From Both Ends

The African elephant is not merely a large animal — it is the architect of the African wilderness, a keystone species whose memory, intelligence and social bonds sustain entire ecosystems. And right now, in Botswana, which holds the largest elephant population on Earth, these magnificent creatures are being killed from both ends. Illegally by criminal syndicates in the north. Legally by trophy hunters in the east. Both are devastating. Both, in the end, amount to the same thing.

In late May, twenty elephant tusks were seized in northern Botswana, linked to Zambian poachers. According to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), the tusks weigh between 24kg and 42kg each — the ivory of large, mature animals. Twenty tusks means ten elephants dead. No arrests have yet been made. The EIA warns this is not an isolated incident but part of a resurgent trafficking network operating across the entire southern African region, testing the gaps in enforcement once more.

Then, this morning, Okavango News 24/7 reported that a rare single-tusker elephant has been hunted in eastern Botswana. Heavy rains had pushed herds deep into dense vegetation; once conditions cleared, the hunting team observed between fifteen and twenty mature bulls daily before selecting and shooting the single-tusker. Single-tusked elephants are genetic rarities — individuals noted and cherished by conservationists and tourists alike. The very quality that made this elephant unique made it a more desirable trophy.

It would be convenient to treat poaching and trophy hunting as opposites — one criminal, one regulated. In reality they are twin expressions of the same fatal logic: that elephants are worth more dead than alive. Both target the same animals. Elephant scientists have stated it plainly — poachers want the ivory for the market, trophy hunters want it for the wall, but both go after the oldest bulls with the biggest tusks. These are the very animals whose experience, genetics and social authority hold herds together. When they are gone, something irreplaceable goes with them.

Botswana has set a record trophy hunting quota of 430 elephants for 2026 — the highest anywhere in the world — while illegal poaching is simultaneously rising and criminal networks operate with impunity. There are estimated to be fewer than 90 true tuskers left across the whole of Africa. Each one killed by a poacher or a paying hunter brings that number down by one and takes decades of irreplaceable life with it.

The elephants do not distinguish between a poacher’s rifle and a trophy hunter’s. Neither should we.

https://lionaid.org/news/2026/06/botswanas-elephants-killed-from-both-ends.htm

22/04/2026

The Line in the Sand: Why is the UK Government still stalling on Trophy Hunting?

Yesterday, LionAid met with Ministers and officials at the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA). We arrived with a clear message, backed by 11 years of tireless campaigning and the support of hundreds of thousands of you.

The outcome, however, was a bitter pill to swallow.

Despite a clear pledge in the Labour Manifesto that "a vote for Labour is a vote for animals," we have learned that the commitment to bring in a Hunting Trophies Import Ban will NOT be included in the forthcoming King’s Speech.

Promises vs. Reality
We’ve been here before. In 2015, the then UK Environment Minister personally told LionAid a ban on lion trophy imports was coming. It never did. Now, history seems to be repeating itself. While the Government maintains the ban is still "on the agenda," their actions—or lack thereof—tell a different story.
It isn’t just the trophy ban that’s at risk; recent reports suggest commitments to ban fur and foie gras imports have also been sidelined. If this Government truly believes that animal welfare is a priority, why are these "low-hanging fruit" policies being dropped when the public demand for them is so high?



The Maths of Extinction
While politicians debate "timelines" and "legislative windows," the African lion is running out of time.

Lion Aid's latest estimate show only around 13,000 lions left in the strongholds of Southern and Eastern Africa, with populations in the West and Central regions facing total collapse.

Lions cannot wait for another election cycle or another decade of "consultations." Every trophy allowed through UK ports is a green light to an industry that prioritizes "souvenirs" over the survival of a species

We Need Your Voice: The Road to One Million

In 2019, LionAid launched a petition to stop these imports. Today, it stands at over 906,000 signatures.

We are so close to the one million mark. Reaching this milestone is a powerful way to show the Government that they cannot ignore the public's will. They need to hear that we see through the empty promises and we demand the ban be enacted without further delay. https://www.change.org/p/ban-lion-trophy-hunting-imports-into-the-uk

How you can help today:

Sign and Share: If you haven’t signed this petition yet, please do so now. If you have, share it with five friends.
Contact your UK MP: Remind them that their manifesto promised to be "on the side of animals." Ask them why the Hunting Trophies Bill has been left out of the King’s Speech.
Spread the Word: Use the hashtag and let the Government know that the UK should not be a market for the destruction of wildlife.


The King’s Speech may be missing the Bill, but our movement is not missing its resolve. We will not stop until the UK’s doors are closed to trophy hunting for good.



Our fight to protect lions is far from over. Your continued donations are the lifeblood of our mission, directly funding the critical work needed to secure a future for these magnificent creatures. Please help us if you can with a donation https://lionaid.org/donate.php Thank you.