Inside the illegal lion trade

João Almeida was used to finding dead lions in his work as a wildlife veterinarian in Mozambique. Some had been strangled by wire snare traps, which had been set for other species targeted as bushmeat. Other lions had been shot or poisoned near livestock farms, suggesting they had been killed in retaliation for preying on cattle.

In 2016, however, Almeida saw something completely different: a lion carcass with the paws, head, and some bones and organs removed.

He’d heard from a colleague that troubling finds like this were turning up in Limpopo National Park, “so unfortunately I knew it would be just a matter of time before I saw it with my own eyes,” says Almeida, director of the Mozambique Wildlife Alliance, a non-profit organization that collaborates with government on conservation.

Even so, he adds, it was “heartbreaking.”

Almeida was not the only one who observed a disturbing trend of targeted killing of lions. In the past few years, especially, Peter Lindsey, director of the Lion Recovery Fund at the Wildlife Conservation Network, a non-profit organization that supports conservationists working on the ground, began hearing “an alarming” number of similar stories from field managers across the continent, he says. “People were sending gory photos of lions with their heads and paws cut off."

(25 majestic lion photos)

A new kind of killing

People have hunted lions for centuries to protect livestock and as cultural rites of passage, but big cats weren’t often targeted for their body parts before. By contrast, tigers are in serious decline partially because of demand for their body parts—especially in Asia, where their bones are used in traditional Chinese medicine and tiger bone wine. 

For lions, on the other hand, loss of habitat due to human development and declines in prey species due to bushmeat hunting have contributed to significant population reductions. Livestock owners also frequently target them. As a result, about half of Africa’s lions have disappeared over the last 30 years or so; fewer than 25,000 survive today across just 6 percent of the species’ historic range.

Now, poaching for body parts could become an additional major driver of lion decline. “You can lose a whole lion population very quickly if you’re not on top of it,” says Kerri Rademeyer, the former chief executive officer of Wildlife Crime Prevention Zambia, a Lusaka-based company that partners with the government to prevent environmental crime.

Bob Mandinyenya, head of scientific services at Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe, saw targeted lion killing for the first time in 2020. The poachers had laced a donkey carcass with poison, a method that kills not only lions but also any other creature that takes a bite, including vultures, hyenas, jackals and leopards. The perpetrators were later caught with the lions’ paws and claws while trying to cross into Mozambique, which borders the park. “They sought to profit from the death of these lions,” Mandinyenya says. 

Mozambique is an epicenter for both poaching and trafficking of the big cats. Targeted poaching has already caused “unambiguous declines” in lion populations in Limpopo National Park, Lindsey says. In 2019, researchers estimated that 61 percent of Limpopo’s lion deaths at the hands of humans were due to targeted poaching. The problem has also spilled into parts of neighboring Kruger National Park in South Africa, threatening that lion stronghold.

Lindsey and his colleagues do not have a full, clear picture of the extent and intensity of the threat. They do know, though, that it is likely much bigger than the piecemeal anecdotes they managed to collect. Partly, this is because lions are not always closely monitored, and their carcasses can be very easy to miss. In a study published in 2025, Almeida and his colleagues calculated that such carcasses are discovered just 10 to 20 percent of the time in larger nature reserves with limited funding for patrols and wildlife monitoring—a description that fits many protected areas in Africa. “It’s not like having an elephant or rhino carcass,” Rademeyer says. Lions and other big cats are smaller and harder to spot, and “poachers take a lot of the parts so there’s nothing much left to find.”

Even based on the limited information the team was able to collect, though “we definitely see that [targeted poaching is] increasing in a number of areas,” says Samantha Nicholson, manager of the African Lion Database at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “It’s also being done with more intention in a well-organized way.”

(Where lions once ruled, they are now quietly disappearing)

An appetite for lion amulets

Poachers go after elephants specifically for their tusks, and rhinos for their horns. But lions face multiple sources of demand for different parts of their body. “That’s one of the reasons it’s been so hard to crack down,” Almeida says. 

Much of that demand seems to be tied to Chinese or Vietnamese consumers, Lindsey says. African traditional cultural, medicinal, religious or spiritual use also plays a role. In Senegal and some other West African countries, for example, Muslims wear amulets crafted with small pieces of lion skin embroidered with Koran text for protection, says Philipp Henschel, the regional director of West and Central Africa for Panthera, an international conservation group devoted to preserving wild cats.

West Africa’s lions are critically endangered, with only two populations of around 400 total animals remaining. Meanwhile, the region is home to around 400 million people, and national economies are growing—causing demand for lion amulets to increase as more people can afford them. As West Africa’s lions have disappeared, Henschel and his colleagues found that traders have begun sourcing animals from central, eastern and southern Africa. Lion skins are illegal to sell, “but the penalties are still very weak and everyone knows it’s for religious use, so it’s a very sensitive subject,” Henschel says. He’s heard of police officers and even park rangers tasked with protecting the region’s last lions wearing amulets. 

Demand for wild lion parts also seems to be linked in complicated and poorly understood ways to lion farms in South Africa. These farms provide cub-petting—touching and taking photos with baby lions for a fee—and, when the cubs grow up, canned hunting opportunities, a controversial activity that involves paying to shoot captive-bred animals in fenced enclosures. Up until 2019, these operations could also commercially export skeletons and other parts from captive-bred lions, within a certain quota set by the government. These shipments mostly wound up in Asia, where they were passed off as tiger parts.

As the legal industry grew, so, too, did the illegal one. In 2019, for example, officials at OR Tambo airport in Johannesburg seized over 700 pounds of lion bones traffickers had tried to smuggle out. Demand for bones also began to spill into wild lion populations, Almeida says, with poaching increasing “in tandem with the canned lion industry in South Africa.”

South Africa has not set an export quota since 2019, meaning any lion parts that have left the country since then have done so illegally. But demand still exists. “The canned lion industry created a huge market for lion bones in Asia, and it seemed only a matter of time before people would start to target wild lions to meet the growing demand,” says Craig Packer, a lion biologist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the new study. “Sadly, this has come to pass.”

Organized gangs that specialize in wildlife and other types of crime are also now trafficking in “huge amounts of lion parts,” says Almeida, who is part of a collaborative effort with the Mozambique government and other non-profit partners to identify and disrupt the networks involved.

In 2022, for example, Mozambican authorities dismantled a large rhino poaching syndicate with links to transnational Vietnamese networks. In addition to ivory and rhino horn, the investigators discovered over 650 pounds of lion parts at one of the properties they searched. The traffickers, who were based in Mozambique, also worked closely with Vietnamese-owned lion farms in South Africa, so Almeida suspects that most of the bones recovered in the investigation were from captive-bred animals. To answer that question with certainty, he hopes to work with authorities to submit the bones for genetic analysis.

Ultimately, though, “it doesn’t really matter” whether lion parts came from captive-bred or wild animals, Rademeyer says, “because all trade drives markets.”

(This is the only place on Earth where lions live alone)

How to protect a lion

Raising awareness is only the first step in addressing the lion poaching problem. The authors of the new paper also outlined six areas of improvement to protect lions in the wild, to better understand and disrupt the trade and to reduce demand for lion parts.

For starters, they call on everyone who works with lions—from tourism operators to park directors—to submit reports about lion poaching to local authorities and the African Lion Database, which consolidates and standardizes critical data for the species. At the moment, Rademeyer says, “everyone is seeing and identifying these potential risks, but not putting it together.” 

Once the problem is identified in an area, close monitoring and protection of lions in the field can make a real difference. At Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park, for example, Mandinyenya and his colleagues responded to the new poaching threat by forming special lion monitoring and border patrol teams. They follow vultures that they have outfitted with satellite tags to find poisoned baits and remove them before lions and other animals arrive at the scene, and they are also working more closely with local communities living around the park. These efforts are ongoing, but already, the lion population has grown from 55 in 2021 to at least 71, Mandinyenya says.

Another priority is curbing demand among specific user groups. This is challenging, but past examples show it is doable. For example, in 2013 in South Africa, Panthera worked with Shembe religious leaders to replace ceremonial leopard skins with high-quality synthetic versions. Henschel and his colleagues are now preparing a dialogue with religious leaders in Senegal who prescribe lion amulets to see if a similar approach might work there. 

Lions also need to be elevated on governments’ priority lists for conservation and legal protection, conservation advocates say. In some West Africa countries, they are not even fully protected species. An important part of the solution will be convincing authorities to take lion poaching seriously. Collaboration between countries will also be key—ideally, sparking cross-border investigations that result in dismantling and prosecuting the criminal networks behind the illegal trade.

Amy Dickman, a wildlife conservationist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the new research, adds one other potential solution to the list: giving people who live alongside lions a reason to want to keep the big cats around. “Whether this involves improving traditional economic incentives like photo tourism or trophy hunting, or developing innovative financial mechanisms, direct local benefits from lions will likely play a key role in tackling this threat,” she says. 

Amidst all the new challenges, Almeida says he tries to maintain a positive outlook. Lion populations have already been “hammered for years and years,” he says, yet the big cats continue to persist. He and his colleagues are determined to make sure that remains the case.