Zimbabwe restricts hunting after lion kill

Walter James Palmer, who has kept a low profile in the face of protests at his clinic, is being sought for questioning by Zimbabwe authorities but according to the U.S. embassy in the capital Harare, there is no information about any extradition request. Stapelkamp had first alerted authorities that something might be wrong after Cecil’s Global Positioning System collar stopped sending a signal.

Stapelkamp shares the anger, not just because of the demise of Cecil.

The wrath of the Internet has descended upon Walter Palmer, the Minneapolis-area dentist who has acknowledged killing Cecil, a star lion of Zimbabwe’s national park system. “I think the main thing is to try to wake up to the fact that it’s incredibly expensive to save animals like lions, that this is a problem that’s probably going to take billions of dollars every year for the rest of time”, he said.

“We are still waiting for the state to charge him as no formal charges have yet to be laid against my client”, his lawyer Tonderai Mukuku told Associated Press. Cecil was 13 years old when he was lured away from the protection of the park and killed. He arrived as a kind of lion refugee, alone and wandering after being displaced from another territory.

The cubs are alive and are likely to be defended by Cecil’s brother, Jericho, who may have fathered some cubs himself, said professor David Macdonald, director of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit.

“They’re burning fire breaks”.

Extraditions “inevitably come down to political and diplomatic considerations far more than they do legal ones”, Vladeck said.

It will be up to the authorities to sort out the truth, but one has to wonder what Palmer did when the study collar on the lion was detected. “It’s unacceptable”.

She said that Cecil’s killing was “deliberate” because it had taken place on land where the owner had not been allocated a quota for lions, and a bow and arrow was used “to hide the illegal hunt by using a means that would not alert the rangers on patrol”.

“When it’s well-managed”, Hoffman says, “a lot of that income goes back into conservation and into supporting local communities and so on”.

The lion “comes across that scent trail and it leads him straight to this bait”, Stapelkamp said. Treating them as museum pieces like Thomas Jefferson did when displaying the antlers Lewis and Clark gave him from their expedition.

He said Palmer’s explanation – that local guides told him the hunt was legal – seemed plausible.

“Over 95 percent were against hunting any endangered species for sport”, he says.

The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service has been attempting to talk with Palmer who has gone into hiding following an worldwide public backlash and shaming. “For inquiries regarding any law enforcement aspects of the case, we refer you to the government of Zimbabwe or the Department of Justice”.