Lion Aid

06/10/2026

Will you Vote for Us! LionAid Needs Your Support in the My Favourite Voucher Codes Charity Poll

Who Are My Favourite Voucher Codes?

They are a voucher code website that donates 20% of their profits to charity every month. And we are lucky enough to have been chosen this month as one of the charities that visitors to their website can choose from, to receive this much-needed sum of money.

General information about the poll

Four different charities take part every month, the one with the most votes at the end of the month wins the poll and therefore the donation.

How to vote in the Poll

Click on My Favourite Voucher Codes homepage: https://www.myfavouritevouchercodes.co.uk/
Scroll until you see the poll in the centre of the page
Click on LionAid
Click on the small circle next to LionAid
Click VOTE
You can also go straight to this month’s poll
https://www.myfavouritevouchercodes.co.uk/poll/oct26

The poll is free to vote in.
You do not need to use any vouchers to vote.
There is no need to enter any information or sign up to anything.
Everyone gets one vote.
The poll runs from the 1st October to the 31st October.

Why this vote matters

If we win, the funds will help us bring our Merrueshi initiative to the next village in Kenya. Our work there helps communities and lions live side by side, reducing the conflict that so often puts both people’s livelihoods and lions’ lives at risk.

For communities living alongside lions, the conflict is deeply personal. When a lion kills livestock, a family can lose a significant part of its wealth and security overnight. Understandably, that can lead to retaliation, and lions are killed in response. Lion numbers are already under severe pressure, so every loss counts.

The Merrueshi initiative tackles this at the root. By helping protect livestock, it gives families a real reason to see lions as neighbours rather than threats. When people stop losing animals, the pressure to retaliate fades, and both people and lions are safer.

This is where winning makes such a difference:

It lets us reach another village. Each village we work with is a place where lions and people can coexist rather than clash. Funding is the main thing standing between us and the next one.
It’s prevention, not a cure. Money spent on protecting livestock now saves lions and livelihoods later, so the impact lasts well beyond the initial investment.
It protects people as well as lions. This isn’t a choice between wildlife and communities. Solutions that work for families are the ones that last, and that’s what makes the project so effective.
A small amount goes a long way. Funding in conservation often stretches further on the ground than people expect, and a prize like this could be the difference between starting the next village this year or waiting.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR SUPPORT! PLEASE VOTE FOR US TODAY!!
https://www.myfavouritevouchercodes.co.uk/poll/oct26

https://lionaid.org/will-you-vote-for-us/

24/09/2026

Our Merrueshi project on BBC South East last week.

On Thursday 17 September the BBC told the story of our Merrueshi project in Kenya, and we could not be prouder.

BBC South East journalist Stuart Maisner made a filmed report for BBC South East Today and wrote the BBC News article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2l8x8rp48xo (Scheme aids lions in the wild and Kenyan villagers). Chris was also interviewed live on BBC Radio Kent’s breakfast programme.

Watch the TV report and listen to the radio interview here.
https://lionaid.org/blog/merrueshi-project/merrueshi-on-the-bbc/
https://lionaid.org/blog/merrueshi-project/merrueshi-on-the-bbc/
We have kept copies on our own website so they will always be there.

What the BBC saw

Merrueshi sits beside Amboseli National Park, where lions and other predators take livestock from the Maasai villages, known as manyattas. When a family loses its cattle, lions have usually paid with their lives.

The project was designed together with the Maasai, and they run it themselves. Solar-powered flashing lights around each manyatta keep predators away at night. In return, each household gives two head of livestock to a community insurance herd, managed by the elders, which replaces any animal that is still lost. The same panels light people’s homes, so children can do their homework after dark and families no longer rely on kerosene lamps.

Six villages are equipped so far. In all the time the project has been running, not a single lion has been killed in retaliation for livestock losses.

Help us reach more villages

There are 58 manyattas in Merrueshi, and we want every one of them protected. Each new village we equip means safer livestock, lit homes and lions that are no longer shot in revenge. Please donate if you can, and share the BBC report with anyone you think would care.

You can read more about the Merrueshi project here:
https://lionaid.org/lionaids-merrueshi-maasai-community-project-exceeds-all-expectations/

Thank you

A huge thank you to Stuart Maisner and the BBC South East and BBC Radio Kent teams for telling this story with such care, and to Pete Haygarth, whose photographs of Merrueshi appeared in the coverage.

15/09/2026

Three young lions shot at Tsutsubega. Paying farmers later does not stop this.

https://lionaid.org/three-young-lions-shot-at-tsutsubega/



Three young male lions have been shot and killed by farmers at Tsutsubega, on the southern edge of the Okavango Delta, according to local reporting by Dikgang Newspaper. The killings sit a short distance from Nxaraga, where a pack of endangered African wild dogs was poisoned only weeks ago.

Tsutsubega is a small cattle-keeping community on the buffalo fence, north of Maun. Livestock and wildlife share the same ground. When a cow is taken, a household loses food, savings and standing. If the next thing that happens is a gun or a poisoned carcass, three lions die, and so do wild dogs, eagles and vultures. That is not a run of bad luck. It is what happens when people are left to settle the bill alone, after the animal is already dead.

What has been reported
Dikgang says the three lions were young males, shot in an outbreak of human-wildlife conflict close to Nxaraga. We have not used the photographs circulating with that report. They came off social media, and they show a dead animal. The picture with this piece is one of ours, of living lions, to illustrate the story.

The same stretch of bush has already had a grim month. Botswana’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks recorded 20 African wild dogs poisoned in the NG30 concession along the Nxaraga area, about ten kilometres from the village: ten adults and ten puppies, together with two eagles. The carcasses were found on a regular patrol. Four men have been arrested. The acting regional wildlife coordinator for the North West, Thebeyakgosi Horatius, called the loss a serious blow. This was the department’s second poisoning case of the year, after 30 vultures died near Phuduhudu in June.

You can read the official account in the Botswana Daily News.

Paying 40 percent, eight months later, does not stop a shooting
When stories like this break, the likely offer from other organisations is a government or private payout scheme. A farmer whose cow has been killed waits, possibly eight months or could be even more, and then receives a percentage of the market value of that animal. That percentage could perhaps be around only 40 percent of its market value. The household is still well out of pocket. The next lion that walks through the cattle post is still a threat. Nothing about that arrangement keeps livestock alive through the night, so nothing about it keeps lions alive either.

LionAid does not promote that model, and we will not pretend it is the answer at Tsutsubega.

What we do instead
Our work is built to stop the attack in the first place. At Merrueshi, on community land bordering Amboseli National Park in Kenya, the Maasai community and LionAid put solar predator lights around the perimeter fence of the manyattas (villages) plus a light in each household. Predators hunt in the dark. They do not like those lights, and they stay away.

The villages did not get the lights as a free gift. Households pay with livestock (two heads of livestock per household), and those animals go into “an insurance herd” that the community keeps itself, differentiated by a special ear tag. If a household in any of the villages loses an animal, the insurance herd can replace the animal, one for one, locally and quickly, decided by the elders. It is not a cheque from far away, months later, for a fraction of the value.

The results are not theoretical. Manyattas with the lights have had no predation on livestock. There has not been a single retaliatory killing of a predator since the programme began. The community herd has grown to more than 500 animals. Children in those households have light inside the house for the first time, and the elders say they are doing better at school because they can finish their homework after dark.

Chris was talking about exactly this with BBC South East this week. The timing is not an accident. Three young males have just been shot on the Okavango edge, and the same old argument will now be wheeled out: pay the farmer, eventually, and hope the killing stops. It does not. Lights around the perimeter fence, a community that runs the response itself, and animals replaced by animals, do.

You can read how Merrueshi has gone here.https://lionaid.org/lionaids-merrueshi-maasai-community-project-exceeds-all-expectations/

Why Tsutsubega matters
Young dispersing males are the ones who walk the fence lines. They leave their natal pride, travel along floodplains, and step straight into cattle country. Three of them will not be coming back. The people who shot them were protecting a livelihood. Until that livelihood is protected overnight, the next three will go the same way.

Merrueshi is in Kenya, not Botswana. The principle travels. Equip the night enclosure, let the community set the rules, and stop asking a delayed, partial payout to do a job it has never done. That is the LionAid initiative. It is the one we will keep putting in front of anyone who asks what should happen after Tsutsubega.

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 r***e. 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/

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