Feature Cecil and WildCRU
COVER: ANDY LOVERIDGE
David Macdonald tells Georgina Ferry that some good might come from the illegal shooting of Cecil the lion
The lion, the web and the WildCRU
O
n 28 July 2015 the American comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel took four minutes of his live broadcast to give his reaction to the recent killing of Cecil the lion by Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. ‘I think it’s important to have some good come out of this disgusting tragedy,’ he concluded, ‘so this is the website for the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at Oxford… If you want to make this into a positive you can make a donation to support them at the very least.’ The story, which had been circulating in the press and on social media for the previous week, went viral. Celebrities from Andy Murray to Cara Delevingne weighed in on Twitter, deploring the killing; 4.4m visitors attempted to access the WildCRU site, which temporarily crashed under the onslaught. No other story has ever kept the Oxford University press office so busy. For nearly a week the WildCRU Director, Professor David Macdonald, did nothing but give interviews by Skype and phone or to visiting TV crews, eating sandwiches on air as one interview segued to the next. The social media onslaught he found ‘unsettling and frightening’ – among all the messages of support, he received hate mail because he said in a broadcast that Palmer had suffered enough vilification and should be left in peace or at least left to the law. When I meet him five months later at the RecanatiKaplan Centre at Tubney House, Macdonald still seems bemused by it all. He and his colleagues have been studying lions in Zimbabwe and neighbouring countries since 1999. Cecil, aged 13, with his distinctive black mane, was one of the study animals: he had been fitted with a GPS collar in 2009. ‘Most of the lions that die in our study area are shot by trophy hunters,’ says 2
Macdonald. ‘A proportion of those are shot illegally. It’s never gone viral before.’ He has led a study of the ‘Cecil moment’, commissioning press analysts, in order to understand more about the role of social media in people’s engagement with wildlife conservation. WildCRU is a research group within the Department of Zoology: like all research groups, it lives hand to mouth on time-limited grants and philanthropic donations. In what some have called a ‘silver lining’, the $1.1m in donations prompted by Cecil’s death will guarantee that WildCRU’s work on the lions of Zimbabwe and Botswana can continue for at least the next two years. This story is much more complicated than ‘hunters bad, conservationists good’. It was the hunting fraternity that first entreated Macdonald and his colleague Dr Andy Loveridge to set up a study on the lions of Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. They were worried about declining numbers – and indeed the latest estimates (led by WildCRU) suggest that there are only 20,000 to 30,000 wild lions left in the world, a tenth of their numbers a century ago. ‘Hunting can be sustainable only if it is closely regulated,’ says Macdonald. ‘In the 1990s hunters were allowed a quota of 60 male lions per year in the area outside the park. Our research showed there were only 25 males in the park altogether: that level of offtake could not be sustained.’ The WildCRU studies showed that hunting outside the park had a ‘perturbation effect’ – it created territorial vacuums that encouraged more lions to leave the park and risk getting shot, while orphaned cubs were often killed by other males moving in on undefended prides. If hunting continued at this level