It has been two years since the world was caught up in the events of Cecil the lion's death via a big game hunter, and today the sad news comes that his son has suffered the same fate.
The Telegraph have reported that the six-year-old Xanda was killed not too far from where his father's remains were found, both just outside of the borders of a park protected from hunting, which would appear to make the killing entirely legal.
The identity of the hunter has not yet been announced, but like his father, Xanda was also part of a study by the Department of Zoology at Oxford University, with the lion's monitoring collar handed in to Richard Cooke, the manager of RC Safaris, the company that oversees legal hunting in the area.
Andrew Lovridge, one of the Oxford researchers who had been studying Cecil and Xanda, stated that: "Richard Cooke is one of the ‘good’ guys. He is ethical and he returned the collar and communicated what had happened. His hunt was legal and Xanda was over six years old so it is all within the stipulated regulations."
The reaction to the death of Cecil was incredibly powerful, which actually resulted in
the hunter in that case being essentially run out of his home-town and forced to close down his dentistry business there.
At the centre of the consternation of the issue lies with the fact that while big game hunters can pay in excess of €50,000 to hunt the animals and then have their heads cured and mounted and sent to their homes, over 70% of the funds used to protect Zimbabwe’s wildlife and catch poachers is sourced from the revenue gained from these professional hunters.
