Linda said the cubs’ mother herself survived after her pride’s leading male was killed and another took over.Īnd she warned that the last litter of white cubs, born in 2006, died soon after hunters killed their father. And if the leader of a pride is shot, his place will be taken by a younger male who will kill all the cubs he has not sired himself. Hunters also operate in the wild, killing males. And cubs left behind are not safe either. Timbavati lions often fall victim to the grotesque practice of “canned hunting”, where poachers steal male cubs, raise them, then let them loose in fenced areas for foreigners to shoot. White lions are the ultimate trophy for rich men who will pay £100,000 for the chance to defy the law and kill one. For more on white lions and the Trust, visit the organization’s website.One of the white lion cubs looks straight through the reeds at the photographer (Image: Scott Ramsay / Barcroft)īut as she celebrated, she warned of the real threat the cubs face from the callousness of rich hunters and those who profit from their so-called sport. The Global White Lion Protection Trust is seeking to re-establish white lions within their natural distribution range in the way they once occurred naturally. The result has been a great decline in the frequency of occurrence of the white lion, and a technical extinction in the wild for the last 12 years. Along with these removals, lion culling in the Kruger National Park in the 1970s and trophy hunting of male lions in the Timbavati have depleted the gene pool. According to the Global White Lion Protection Trust, these operations, as well as zoos, specifically bred white lions because of their rarity and exploited them for financial gain. Most were removed from their native habitats in the 1970s to establish captive breeding and hunting operations. While the white Spirit Bear still thrives in the remote coastal wilderness of British Columbia, the last recorded wild white tiger was shot in 1958, and white lions are essentially gone from the wild. The ‘Spirit Bear,’ or Kermode bear, is a white variation of a black bear.
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January 2023
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