South Africa’s legal lion bone trade exploited by criminals

This article was provided by the Conservation Action Trust.

Few South Africans would have taken note of a short statement released by the Hawks in November 2019, which details the arrest of two individuals with very similar names.

Yun Li had been on the run from authorities for years, having been set free on bail after being caught in possession of rhino horn in 2015. His associate, Yin Li, was arrested for his connection to some 600kg of lion bones worth R2.25-million seized at OR Tambo International Airport in recent months.

These arrests offer a small glimpse into the sleazy workings of a growing South African industry most people have never even heard of, revealing its extreme, greed-driven profitability and its deep entanglement with global criminal networks involved in the bloody slaughter of Africa’s rhinos, elephants and other wild animal species.

There is damning and public evidence that the people running the supposedly legal production and export of lion bones in South Africa have links to transnational crime syndicates that are involved not only in smuggling rhino horn, elephant ivory and pangolin scales, but also deal in drugs, prostitution and more.

Since 2013, the United States has been offering a reward of $1-million for information that will lead to the dismantling of this network.

The authors of the EMS Foundation/BAT report point out that the addresses of lion bone importers in Laos, Vietnam and Thailand — the three main destination countries — listed on official export permits are almost always inaccurate and insufficiently verified by South African authorities. They demonstrate that even after the Xaysavang Network’s role in illegal wildlife trafficking was known, export permits for lion bones were issued to Xaysavang Trading Export-Import, a company owned by Vixay Keosavang.

The report furthermore provides hard evidence for direct personal connections between some South African lion bone traders and known wildlife traffickers, including Keosavang.

These are just a few of the revelations presented in the report. Others include similarly intimate relationships with wildlife criminals in Thailand and Vietnam, and suggestions that the industry is exploiting weaknesses in permitting and export procedures to under-declare the quantity of bones exported and that shipments may include laundered bones of other species, including tigers and ligers.

Lion bone harvesting

Asked to think of lions, many of us will recall a memorable experience of coming across a lazy pride waiting out the heat of the day under a cluster of shady trees in one of the country’s national parks.

Sadly, that idyllic scenario is no longer a reality for the majority of South African lions. They are much more likely to spend their entire life caged on a farm, raised exclusively to be killed for profit.

There are about 3,000 wild lions in South African nature reserves and national parks. In contrast, some 300 breeding facilities located mostly in the North West, Free State and Limpopo are estimated to host anywhere between 6,000 and 14,000 captive lions.

Having had its origins in the 1990s, the commercial lion breeding industry was started to supply docile targets for the bullets, arrows and crossbow darts of wealthy international trophy hunters.

When the ethical deficiencies of canned lion hunting became an embarrassment even to the most traditionalist international game hunting associations, local lion farmers found eager new customers in Southeast Asia’s markets for wildlife products.

Tiger bones are used in traditional Chinese medicine and the animal’s teeth, claws and skulls are worn and displayed as status symbols in countries such as China and Vietnam.

With tigers receiving much-needed legal protection to save them from extinction, their bones have become difficult to procure and lion bones from Africa have increasingly been used as substitutes to supply this vast market.

Government has been fostering the growth of the captive lion breeding industry and the lion bone trade by enacting supportive policies and regulations, and by being extremely lenient when monitoring its operations, including conditions on breeding farms and in lion slaughterhouses.

Officially sanctioned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), then Minister of Environmental Affairs, Edna Molewa, established an annual export quota of 800 lion skeletons in 2017 and promptly increased it to 1,500 the following year (subsequently decreased to 800).

The industry is a poster child for government’s doctrine of “sustainable use” under which wild animals are considered to be “faunal biological resources” which should be exploited commercially to justify and fund their very existence and survival.

If the recent arrests of Yun Li and Yin Li had revealed the first, tentative suggestions that the trade in lion bones may be connected to illegal wildlife trafficking, we might be inclined to give the South African government the benefit of the doubt with regard to its promotion of the captive lion industry and lion bone trade.

Given the fact, however, that there is long-standing, detailed and documented hard evidence that this business is intricately associated with international criminal networks, it is of grave concern that the breeding and slaughter of lions appears to be facilitated for the sole purpose of making profits for a small group of people at the expense of the country’s reputation with commensurate risk to the greater wildlife economy. DM

Andreas Wilson-Späth is a part-time freelance writer and ex-geologist who lives and works in Cape Town.