THE SOUTH AFRICAN LION BONE QUOTA

A SUBMISSION FROM TWENTY-FIVE NGO’S REPRESENTED BY THE WILDLIFE ANIMAL PROTECTION FORUM SOUTH AFRICA

TO

MINISTER BARBARA CREECY AND THE DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS, FORESTRY AND FISHERIES

The establishment of a lion bone export quota cannot be done without examining and understanding the context and major problems with this so-called industry which are untenable, indefensible and unsustainable.

For more in-depth analysis and articulation of these issues please refer to Appendix 2 and Appendix 3 in The Extinction Business: South Africa’s Lion Bone Trade .

It is important to note that the issue of South Africa’s highly controversial lion bone trade is a national policy issue which has enormous local and global opposition. As a country, if we no longer choose to trade in big cat bones, it will have no impact on our commitments to CITES.

South Africa is under no obligation to CITES to trade in lion bones.

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THE EXTINCTION BUSINESS South Africa’s Lion Bone Trade

EXCERPTS FROM THE REPORT COMPILED BY THE EMS FOUNDATION AND THE BAN ANIMAL TRADING ORGANISATION

For more than a decade, South Africa has been actively supporting and growing the international trade in big cat bones, despite local and international outrage and condemnation from conservation and protection organisations, lion scientists and experts.

In 2017, South Africa’s Minister of Environmental Affairs, Edna Molewa, controversially, and in the face of vociferous opposition and robust arguments against this trade, set the annual export quota at 800 lion skeletons. Even more alarmingly, Molewa, without stakeholder participation, took the incomprehensible decision to almost double the quota in 2018 to 1,500 skeletons.

On July 11th 2018, the person in charge of the quota at the Department of the Environment told us categorically that no quota had been set for 2018. A few days later the DEA was forced to make a public announcement about the 2018 lion bone quota following a public outcry when a letter from Molewa, dated 7th June 2018, informing the provinces of the new quota allocation, was leaked. The undeclared reasons behind government’s decision to conceal this information from interested and affected parties needs to be brought to light and interrogated.

Two members of the Wild Animal Protection Forum South Africa namely the EMS Foundation and the Ban Animal Trading organisation spent eighteen months gathering information and investigating South Africa’s international lion bone trade.

The data that was gathered forms the basis for this report: The Extinction Business: South Africa’s Lion Bone Trade.