American recreational hunter kills lion and laughs: outrage after bow-hunting photos in South Africa

Photos that at first glance look like advertising material in fact show a real killing: an American recreational hunter from Kentucky poses laughing next to a dead lion, while a second man lies on the ground in the image.

The images come from the South African company Choronga Safaris, a provider specialising in big-game bow hunting with concessions in South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Mozambique and Namibia. According to its own statements, the shooter is a practising doctor, which caused additional outrage on social media: someone who saves lives in his professional life takes one from a wild animal in his spare time.

The lion was not killed with a rifle but with bow and arrow, a method regarded among recreational hunters as particularly “challenging”, but which in fact carries a higher risk of an imprecise, agonisingly slow death for the animal.

Not an isolated case

The current case is one in a long list of similar incidents. As early as 2015, the killing of the lion Cecil in Zimbabwe caused worldwide outrage, and in 2021 it was the turn of Mopane, another well-known lion in the same area. Such trophy hunts frequently target high-ranking, territory-holding males, whose loss destabilises entire prides: succeeding males often kill the young of their predecessor in order to assert their own genetic line.

Between 2009 and 2018, according to international trade data, over 7’600 lion trophies were traded worldwide, while the wildlife population in Africa has shrunk to an estimated 20’000 or so adult animals.

That the photos in the current case look like staged advertising shots is no coincidence but a symptom: the trophy hunting industry sells an experience in which the death of an endangered animal is stylised into a trophy and a status symbol. The laughter over the dead animal is not a slip-up but the logical expression of a practice that consistently treats wild animals as commodities. The industry likes to justify itself with alleged revenues for local communities, yet studies show that only a fraction of the proceeds from trophy hunting even reaches them, while nature-based photo tourism demonstrably generates higher and more sustainable income – entirely without dead lions.