The son of Cecil the Lion, whose killing by dentist Walter Palmer sparked international outrage, has been killed under similar circumstances.
Xanda, a six-year-old lion, was in his prime and just just outside the Hwange National Park. That’s near the area in north west Zimbabwe where Cecil was killed in 2015.
Like Cecil, Xanda was wearing an electronic collar, fitted by researchers at Oxford University monitoring his 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, according to an exclusive in the Daily Telegraph
Andrew Loveridge from the Department of Zoology at Oxford University, which has a team supplying and fixing collars which monitor the lions in the Hwange National Park, said:
I fitted it last October. It was monitored almost daily and we were aware that Xanda and his pride was spending a lot of time out of the park in the last six months, but there is not much we can do about that.
Part of the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology, WildCRU is a pioneering, inter-disciplinary research unit in a world-class academic centre.
At the WildCRU, in the Recanati-Kaplan Centre at Oxford,researchers study lions in various parts of Africa to uncover the science that will inform and underpin their conservation.
This is urgent, because lion numbers are precariously low, estimated at fewer than 30,000 across the continent and we have evidence that there are actually fewer.
They have satellite-tracked the movements of over a hundred lions and monitored every detail of the lives of more than 500 individuals.
Cecil the lion was killed after a dentist name Walter Palmer from Minnesota paid a private hunting guide $50,000 to arrange a hunt. Using a dead animal as bait, Cecil was lured out of the park and Palmer shot him with a bow and arrow.
Photo credit: WCRU
