AGONIZING LAST MOMENTS OF AFRICA'S LION KING & HOW ONE MAN'S VANITY LED TO ITS TROPHY KILLING.

LION KING "CECIL" WITH A LIONESS

Death did not come quickly for Cecil, an alpha male lion and leader of his pride in a protected sanctuary inside one of Africa’s great national parks.

With a distinctive black mane, this magnificent creature was, at the age of 13, known for his imperious attitude towards tourists on game drives — he would sometimes charge their vehicles to let them know who was boss.

He was named Cecil after Cecil Rhodes, the British mining magnate, having first been spotted in 2008 at a place called White Man’s Watering Hole inside Zimbabwe’s famous Hwange National Park, and subsequently given a collar to track his movements for an Oxford University project.

But he was tricked earlier this month into leaving his sanctuary. Pieces of meat had been left just outside the boundary of Cecil’s territory, where no hunting is allowed and anti-poaching patrols operate.

Cecil picked up the scent and followed the trail, leaving his pride of two lionesses and six cubs inside the park. It proved a fatal mistake.

For the meat was bait left by hunters intent on luring him from the safety of the park. They were waiting in vehicles with high-powered lamps to illuminate the African bush as soon as Cecil came to investigate this easy meal.

One report suggested that the hunters had even tied meat to the front of their vehicle, hoping Cecil would approach so close it would make killing him easier.

What is certain is that an arrow was fired by a 55-year-old American dentist called Walter Palmer, who had paid £32,000 to Zimbabwean guides in return for the chance to kill the so-called King of the Jungle. The arrow hit Cecil in the flank. Enraged, hurt and terrified, the lion ran off into the bush.

DR WALTER PAID $50,000 FOR THE LIFE OF CECIL.

The hunters and their guides, including our dentist friend Walter Palmer, returned to their camp to wait for first light and then followed the trail of blood on foot and in vehicles.

Horrifically maimed, Cecil managed to stay alive for 40 hours. Speeding through the bush, and sometimes stopping to rest in heavy undergrowth, he managed to keep ahead of the men pursuing him for almost two days.

But he could not keep running or hiding for ever. Exhausted and near death, Cecil was finally run to ground by the hunters miles from where he was first wounded.

The men approached the wounded animal and shot him dead. With Cecil cornered and dangerous, it’s understood a professional hunter delivered the fatal bullet while Palmer watched.

Guides moved in, skinning the lion and hacking off his head as trophies to be shipped home to hang on the hunter’s wall.

DR WALTER & A RHINO KILLED FOR FUN

The fact is that the killing of such impressive animals happens every day in Africa, where rich trophy hunters — mostly from the U.S. and Russia — pay huge fees to shoot wild creatures, but they don’t have Cecil’s fame.

‘Cecil was beautiful — one of the most beautiful animals you’d ever see,’ says Johnny Rodrigues, a former soldier who runs the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, a charity dedicated to protecting animals.

‘Nine times out of ten, during a safari drive, you’d come across him walking with his family. He was one of the animals it was guaranteed you’d see. Thousands have seen him. Instead of protecting him, they go ahead and kill him.’

Much filmed and photographed by tourists, Cecil was known all over the world. His slaughter, unusually, has prompted a full investigation by Zimbabwean authorities into the circumstances of his death.

DR WALTER & A BIGHORN SHEEP KILLED FOR FUN

We now know that Palmer, from Minnesota — who had killed wild animals on previous hunts in Africa, including lions and leopards — paid a fee of $50,000 (£32,000) to a Zimbabwean hunting company, one of many in southern Africa.

There are fortunes to be made from killing wild animals for sport. Charles Davy, the father of Prince Harry’s former girlfriend, Chelsy, is one of those who has offered trophy hunts in Zimbabwe and neighbouring Zambia.

However grisly, this is legal. Both governments issue hunting concessions to preferred companies, providing licenses that allow hunters to kill a certain number of animals, including elephants, lions and leopards, in specified areas.

DR WALTER & A DEAD ELK KILLED FOR FUN

Mr Davy, who is close to President Robert Mugabe’s regime, pays an undisclosed fee to the government for licences to kill big game such as lions, leopards, elephants and buffalo. He and dozens of other operators charge hunters rates of up to £20,000 per animal killed.

Indeed, one hunting company in Zimbabwe, whose motto is ‘your dream — our mission’, was yesterday offering ‘hunt specials’ involving the shooting of one lion for $18,500, an elephant for $28,000 or a rare rhino for $47,000. All lodgings, drinks and transport are provided.

Such is the popularity of the sport in certain circles that many hunters film their kills and share them with other enthusiasts.

In one such mobile phone video, a man places a heavy metal-ripped arrow known as a Full Metal Jacket in a powerful, high-tech bow. Then he fires at a lion nearby.

As the arrow strikes, the animal roars in pain and shock, writhing and frantically pawing to find the source of what is causing such agony.

In other footage compiled by investigators, a group of five men, dressed in the latest expensive hunting apparel, are seen being driven through an enclosure before stopping on a hill opposite a male lion resting a few hundred yards away. Suddenly, they all open fire, cutting the creature down in a fusillade of bullets.

There’s nothing ‘noble’ about much of this hunting. Though they may appear wild, many of the lions shot on certain hunts have grown up being bottle-fed by humans. This is the world of ‘canned’ lion hunting, where the big cats are raised in cages before being released into fenced areas to be shot by paying guests.

 

Cubs are taken from their mothers at birth so the lionesses can become fertile and immediately pregnant again, thus providing more animals for the supply line.

Before they’ve fully grown, the young animals are often put on display at tourist ‘lion farms’ around Southern Africa, where people pay to pet them and view the older, breeding lions during the day, when they are allowed into enclosures.

Indeed, there are more lions in farms than there are in the wild.

What these paying tourists don’t realise, however, is that these animals are later sold on to hunters who openly advertise their services online and have agents throughout Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East promoting the chance to shoot a lion in its habitat.

So desperate are these operators to satisfy their high-paying customers that they will even lay bait around watering holes and employ locals to chase wild animals — be they leopards, elephants or rhinos — in the direction of the guns.

Such practices — and, indeed, the whole so-called sport of trophy hunting — went largely unremarked for years, little known but to the aficionados prepared to part with their money.

In recent years, however, the industry has been beset by increasing controversy, after a series of incidents involving high-profile individuals.

Two years ago, a young American TV presenter shot dead an animal on one African hunt and gushed about it afterwards. Outrage erupted after Melissa Bachmann — the host of Winchester Deadly Passion, a TV show about hunting — posted online a picture of herself smiling in delight beside the magnificent male lion she had killed moments earlier.

She was later axed from a lucrative assignment with the National Geographic Channel after more than 375,000 people signed an online petition denouncing her ‘butchery’.

Photographs of Prince Harry emerged last year in which he posed alongside a one-ton water buffalo he had shot on a big game hunt with his former girlfriend Chelsy Davy in South America; and King Juan Carlos of Spain was vilified for shooting dead an elephant, among other creatures, during a trophy-hunting trip to Botswana in 2012. 

For all the uproar, though, some of those involved in the lion-killing trade accuse opponents of being ‘tree-huggers’ who fail to appreciate Africa’s pitiless nature — where even the greatest predators are part of a food chain with humans at the top.

‘We would not be having this nonsense if we were talking about cattle,’ one lion breeder and hunt organiser told us. ‘We rear them in their millions for their milk and slaughter them for the meat.

‘The lion is a commodity that can be used to benefit everyone: it is sentiment, not logic, that is against this.’

The thousands of people who were privileged to witness Cecil’s power and beauty in his lifetime may well take a different view.

Daily Mail