THE number of lion carcasses exported every year from South Africa to Asia has passed 1,000 amid concerns their bones are increasingly being used as a substitute for those of tigers in traditional Chinese medicine.
Environmentalists fear the growth of the trade is turning captive lions into commodities, posing as great a threat to their survival as that faced by the continent’s rhinos.
There are more than 7,000 captive lions in safari farms and 2,000 in the wild in South Africa. The trade is legal provided the carcasses are from animals bred in captivity. Killing wild lions for export is a violation of international conventions.
Outrage over the fate of Cecil, the Zimbabwean lion killed by Walter Palmer, a dentist from Minnesota, has raised worldwide concern over the exploitation of Africa’s lions.
Ian Michler, a conservationist who has investigated the trade, believes the money to be made from lion bones “poses the greatest threat to wild lions . . . because by exporting bones, you’re fanning the demand”.
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Figures released by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species show that in 2013, 1,094 lion carcasses and 1,097 individual bones were exported from South Africa, against 574 carcasses in 2010 and two in 2007. Middlemen go from farm to farm paying up to £1,300 a time for carcasses.
In traditional Chinese medicine, tiger bones are used to “cure” arthritis, headaches and back problems, and to combat poor sexual performance.
A cake product made from bones, popular in Vietnam, costs almost £6,000 for each pound in weight. Much of the tiger bone wine sold in China is from the bones of African lions, while Vietnamese cakes are often made in South Africa in a process that destroys virtually all the DNA, making it almost impossible to determine which bones went into it.
“Nobody can tell the difference or knows what the hell it is,” said Ammann, who added that on his trips to China he had seen “tons of lion teeth and claws on sale, all advertised as tiger”.