Since the Kenyan government banned hunting in 1977, the number of wild animals outside National Parks has plummeted. Wildlife suddenly lost its economic value, prompting edible game to be snared and sold as bush meat, while carnivores that preyed on people’s livelihood were considered worthless vermin, and were exterminated, as they still are today.

Although sport hunting is illegal in Kenya, in other African countries such as Tanzania, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe it still provides considerable revenue.

Wealthy hunters are willing to pay more than US $30,000 to shoot a male lion, which would be enough to cover the cost of 200 cattle killed by carnivores. In addition, the whole ecosystem could benefit from restoring lion hunting, as it requires a huge prey population and therefore a healthy overall ecosystem to maintain a population of lions.

But many conservationists have major concerns about bringing sport hunting back to Kenya. In addition to any direct demographic impact hunting would have on lion populations, the nature of lion society might mean that trophy hunting could have wider repercussions for lion populations.

Lions are highly social creatures, and are dependent on the other members of their pride to hunt and defend their kills. Each lion relies on the strong teamwork and stability of these groups, and removing certain individuals may have deleterious effects for the whole pride. The hunting of pride males, as would be preferred by trophy hunters, could also lead to increased infanticide, as replacement males enter the pride and kill cubs.

This behaviour has evolved to ensure a male will father cubs, as their residence in a pride is typically only two to four years long, which is roughly the time between a female’s litters. If a female has young cubs when the male joins the pride, he may not get a chance to inseminate her before he is displaced, so to guarantee that he is able to father cubs he kills those that are already there, to induce oestrus in the female.

Infanticide could potentially become sufficiently common to prevent cubs ever reaching adulthood. Targeting pride males could cause complex changes in their social structures, leaving non-viable populations, skewed sex ratios, and altered reproductive responses. More than one study has found that the removal of adult males causes excessive production of male cubs rather than females.

This overproduction of male cubs could potentially become so great that the number of female lions surviving to adulthood decreases, which may cause severe long-term reproductive problems.

However, a recent study has shown that if hunters only shoot males over 5 years old, which have already bred and whose cubs have matured, then there will be no noticeable long-term effect on the overall population. It confirmed that infanticide does increase the risk of population extinction, but that trophy hunting could be sustained by simply hunting male lions above this minimum age threshold. It might also be beneficial to target nomadic males, rather than pride owners to decrease the chance of infanticide, but for both these approaches to work detailed knowledge of the individual lions being hunted would be necessary.

It has also been put forward that hunters could target ‘problem animals’ that consistently take livestock, thus removing the animals that would be killed by farmers anyway, while bringing in additional revenue. This type of hunting would not necessarily increase the number of lions that are killed annually. However, this would be extremely difficult to coordinate, as stock-killing lions would not always be present when hunters were. Another problem is that because lion hunting brings in such large financial rewards, this could be an incentive for farmers to exaggerate claims of livestock losses in order to gain more hunting permits.

The economic benefits to rural areas could make sport hunting a very realistic lion conservation strategy and the income generated could be used to compensate cattle owners, help them improve their livestock husbandry and pay for wider lion conservation efforts. It would not only motivate people to coexist with lions, but also maintain the shyness of lions towards people, reducing potential conflicts between them.

However, there are also plenty of potential problems associated with legalizing this lucrative industry. Unless it were regulated with very tight controls and managed extremely carefully, corruption, mismanagement and financial incentives might mean that hunting quotas were too high to sustain viable populations and lion numbers could decrease even further. There is also the possibility that most of the revenues raised from hunting would go to large hunting companies, while the local communities that were forced to coexist with the lions would not see any financial benefits.