Tandläkare sköt lejonet Cecil för 400 000 kronor

"So why are there over 300,000 tweets about Cecil the Lion and none about Californian black bears? The answer is obvious - it’s a viral moral outrage storm, and it obscures the second moral question at stake here: the conservation management of African lions."

"The terrible reality is that charismatic apex predators do not flourish anywhere in the world where they co-exist with large, dense human populations. Tigers in India, grizzlies in the US, wolves in Europe, sharks off the coast of eastern Australia, cougars in Florida, none of them will find it easy to survive without vigorous management and protection."

For species like lion and elephant, who are dangerous, who kill local people, and are destructive of their livelihoods (eating, respectively, livestock and crops), the incentives need to be particularly strong to offset the costs. That is where hunting licences can play a role. As everyone now knows, the cost to an American tourist of hunting big game in Africa is stupendous. Right now, very little of that tends to flow back into local communities. I’ve seen myself the armoured vehicles and machine-gun toting guards of the Game Controlled Areas around Longido in northern Tanzania. They are leased to Arab hunting companies and in constant conflict with local Maasai pastoralists.

But in other parts of Africa, notably Namibia, hunting concessions are in fact run by local communities, who benefit substantially from them. And these include those expensive, rare, lion hunting licences. Most African states only allow the off-take of adult male lions, who are after all reproductively the least valuable individuals.

By contrast, in Kenya, where trophy hunting was banned in 1977, and traditional pastoralism largely dismantled by privatisation of common lands, national parks are surrounded, cheek by jowl, with farms growing vegetables and flowers for the European market. And Kenyan wildlife populations have declined by up to 70% since then.