Q & A Dr Claudio Sillero

What are the biggest threats lions face? And how has the African population changed over the last few decades?

In the 1970s and 1980s, we were all talking about tigers going extinct and what we were going to do about it, and everyone assumed that African lions were relatively common and they were doing well. It wasn’t until we started looking at the numbers, around 10-12 years ago, when the continent-wide estimate was produced and returned a figure of 22-23,000 lions, when we kind of assumed that there may be as many as 100,000 lions on the continent. So that was a really sobering find.

The main explanation across