A bloodlust for beautiful beasts
The death of Cecil the lion’s son, and a new TV channel, have put hunting back in the crosshairs, says Joe Shute
One need only glance at a photograph of Xanda the lion to glean his proud lineage. He has the same luxuriant mane, although of a lighter hue to his father, Cecil, and the same muscular build, in excess of 32st (200kg). Then there is the unmistakable anvilshaped snout, and pale brown eyes the colour of the Kalahari scrub.
“You can see Cecil’s genes in him,” says Dr Andrew Loveridge, a conservationist, pointing to an image of a magnificent beast that until a few weeks ago, was roaming the plains of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. Now, father and son have met the same end: killed by a hunter and hacked apart to be kept as a trophy. As with Walter James Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who shot Cecil in July 2015, sparking a global outcry, whoever killed Xanda last month would have paid tens of thousands of pounds for the pleasure.
Last week, it seemed that it would soon be possible to watch such hunts from the comfort of our living rooms, when it was announced that Stan Kroenke, the US billionaire owner of Arsenal FC, was extending his online hunting channel, MOTV – which depicts the trophy killing of lions and other African species – across the English-speaking world.
Critics, including Jeremy Corbyn, branded the channel “brutal, unethical and unnecessary”. By Friday, after thousands signed a petition, a statement was issued that acknowledged the public anger “with hunting certain big game animals” and agreed to remove all content “related to those animals in light of the public interest”, although supporters insist any hunts it shows will have been conducted in a legal and ethical way.
Even if the hunting may not be televised, the death of Xanda shows it still continues apace. While Hwange’s 500-strong population of lions are protected inside its 15,000sq km boundaries, each year seven lions are permitted to be killed by trophy hunters in areas to the north and east of the park.
At six years old, Xanda was considered an appropriate age, despite being in his prime – and when he wandered 1.2 miles out of the national park boundary, he was deemed fair game. After his corpse was recovered, the professional guide leading the hunt, Richard Cooke, notified (as he is legally obliged to do) the Hwange Lion Research Project, which monitors the animals as part of Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU).
At first, Dr Loveridge and his colleagues could do nothing more than simply mourn another premature death. Xanda was shot legally as part of an agreed quota and, as unpalatable as it is for many, trophy hunting does have a role to play in ensuring animal populations are not wiped out – with individuals paying between £40,000 and £70,000 to kill one of their number, it provides an incentive for locals to keep the animals there.
The Oxford scientists say Xanda had three lionesses and eight cubs of around two years old, all dependent on him.
Now his family have been left to fend for themselves. If a rival male seeks to take over another’s pride he will often kill his offspring to ensure supremacy. WildCRU’s research shows that cubs are at most risk until 33 months old; Dr Loveridge rates the chances of Xanda’s cubs survival at just 50 per cent.
The Oxford team can speak so candidly about their lions because they know them so intimately. The GPS collars (fitted to 15 animals at £1,500 a piece) provide hourly updates affording unprecedented insight into their lives.
Xanda was first fitted with a collar in 2015 (paid for out of the $1 million (£761,000) in donations received after Cecil’s death, many from small pledges) and in October last year it was replaced by Dr Loveridge.
When we met last week at WildCRU’s Oxford headquarters, the 47-year-old Zimbabwean recalls their close encounter with a sorrowful air.
“I’ve handled that lion, felt the size of his paws and seen him interact with his pride and cubs,” he says. “I cannot understand why another person would look at that wonderful animal and think they couldn’t be happy until they had killed it and put parts of its body on their wall.”
Xanda was born in the north-east of Hwange National Park, in an area known as the Backpans, where ilala palms sway over the grasslands and Cecil once ruled supreme. Cecil sired 13 cubs in total and, in the Backpans pride, Xanda had a brother and two sisters of the same age, as well as a half-brother and three half-sisters born by another lioness.
In 2012, Cecil was displaced by a so-called coalition of two rival males (Bush and Bhubesi) and the pride scattered. Xanda and his halfbrother, Sinangeni, vanished for several months but then reappeared and together began to establish a new dynasty, dominating the pride until Sinangeni, too, was trophy hunted. Left on his own, Xanda began to lose control.
He split off with three lionesses and established a territory in the northernmost area of the park, producing eight cubs. However, in recent months, a rival coalition of males had forced Xanda and his pride out into the teak forests that border the park, where hunters are permitted to roam. The researchers would follow his movements with their hearts in their mouths.
“We just hope they are in the right place at the right time,” Loveridge says, “and unfortunately Xanda was in the wrong place.”
Last year Professor David Macdonald, the director of WildCRU, authored a Government report on lion conservation and trophy hunting. He has just published a new report in the journal Mammal
Review. He highlights the stark figure that lion populations declined by at least 43 per cent between 1993 and 2014 and number about 23,000.
Trophy hunting is not the only cause of the decline, with habitat loss and a booming population in Africa placing huge strain upon areas where lions once roamed.
Indeed, Professor Macdonald observes, it is an uneasy truth that, presently, trophy hunting is one of the few things that brings revenue into the park, which in turn helps conserve landscapes upon which lion populations rely – the current land mass used for trophy hunting in Africa is the size of France and Spain combined.
“While it was a legal hunt, we hope this death encourages the hunting industry to appreciate the importance of the strictest possible regulation of hunting quotas and codes of practice,” Macdonald says.
When the Hwange project started, some 60 lions were allowed to be shot around the national park annually – though this figure was never reached. After persuading the authorities to impose a fouryear moratorium, they managed to reduce the quota to seven, to help the population recover. In the future, WildCRU hopes to persuade the authorities to impose a 5km exclusion zone for hunters around the park boundaries and further raise the age limit for lions that can be legally shot, to better ensure the survival of a pride.
“There is a growing split over trophy hunting, which the outcry over this television channel shows,” says Professor Macdonald. “Our role as researchers is to provide facts to help people form a judgment. Xanda’s death proves the importance of these facts in saving future lives.”
‘We hope they’re in the right place at the right time. Xanda was in the wrong place’