Cecil the lion’s son meets same fate, shot dead in trophy hunt
A SON of Cecil the lion has been killed in its prime by a big game trophy hunter in Zimbabwe two years after its father was killed in similar circumstances.
The six-year-old lion named Xanda was killed just outside the Hwange National Park in north-west Zimbabwe, not far from where Cecil was killed in 2015.
Its death was discovered because Xanda was wearing an electronic collar, fitted by researchers monitoring its movements in the area. When the Zimbabwean professional hunter on the shoot, Richard Cooke from RC Safaris, discovered the dead lion had a collar, he handed it back to the researchers.
Andrew Loveridge, from the Department of Zoology at Oxford University, which has a team supplying and fixing the collars in the park, said: “It was monitored almost daily and we were aware that Xanda and his pride was spending time out of the park in the last six months, but there is not much we can do about that.
“Richard Cooke is one of the ‘good’ guys. He is ethical. He returned the collar and communicated what had happened. His hunt was legal and Xanda was over 6 years old so it is all within the stipulated regulations.”
Mr Loveridge said he hoped that there would soon be a 3.1 mile (5km) exclusion zone around the Hwange National Park so that hunters would no longer accidentally shoot collared lions that wander outside the boundary. Cecil the lion had wandered outside of the park to the area of its birth nearby.
Mr Cooke, a well known professional hunter from Victoria Falls, did not answer his phones yesterday and has not yet revealed the name of his client. But most lion shooters are from the US, UK, Germany or South Africa. The client may have paid about £40,000 for the shoot and for Xanda’s head to be cured and mounted.
Cecil’s death in July 2015 caused widespread anger and threw a spotlight on trophy hunting in Africa. The Daily Telegraph discovered that Walter James Palmer, a 55-year-old dentist from Minnesota, US, paid $65,000 (around £50,000 today) to shoot and kill the lion with a bow and arrow.