PRETORIA — South African President Jacob Zuma did not think the shooting of Cecil the Lion would become such a big issue.
“What it sounds like from a distance, (is that) the hunter did not know that Cecil was so popular,” Zuma told reporters at the Union Buildings in Pretoria yesterday.
“Really I didn’t think it could become such a big issue, but it is a big issue because Cecil was loved.”
Zuma said he had been told that Cecil had a brother, Jericho.
“Thank God, people will now ask is Jericho among these lions? And they will not shoot I would imagine,” he said with a chuckle.
Cecil the Lion was killed by American hunter Walter Palmer last month outside the Hwange National Park.
The lion’s death sparked outrage all over the world and the government called for Palmer’s extradition.
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A local professional hunter Theo Bronkhorst who helped Palmer has charged for failing to prevent an illegal hunter.
The owner of the Gwayi farm where the lion was lured to before it was killed, Honest Ndlovu, also faces charges related to the lion’s death.
President Robert Mugabe blamed Cecil’s death on “foreign vandals”.
Meanwhile, reports that one of Cecil the Lion’s cubs has been killed by a lion trying to mate with its mother are not true, the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (Zimparks) said yesterday.
The seven cubs in Cecil’s pride “were all seen alive and well” up to August 7, the authority said in a statement.
A British paper claimed on Sunday that an eighth cub had been killed, but this occurred long before Cecil was shot dead in an illegal hunt by a US dentist in Hwange National Park early last month, insiders and the parks authority say.
“(Cecil’s) pride originally had eight cubs born. Long before Cecil was illegally hunted, one of them disappeared. The authority can only guess the reason for it to have died, but this is quite natural, perhaps hyena or something else,” the statement says.
Sources in Hwange have been saying since Sunday that the cubs — and Jericho, who was Cecil’s male coalition partner and is now looking after the cubs and bonding with a female called Ketty — are all fine.
Said the parks authority: “The story circulating (on) social network sites that a new male lion has killed one of the cubs and that Jericho has abandoned the pride is just untrue and unfounded at this point.”
The authorities have now lifted a countrywide ban on hunting lions, leopards and elephants, just a week after it was imposed in response to global outrage over Cecil’s killing.
But it remains in force in the area where Cecil and another lion were illegally killed last month. And from now on, hunters on this type of hunt will have to be accompanied by a state parks official. — online
