Turkish authorities at Istanbul International Airport made an intriguing discovery in November 2019 when they inspected a shipment labelled as furniture, on its way from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Romania.

African lions are one of the world’s favourite animals. But their numbers have been shrinking over the past century, especially over the past 30 years. Some scientists estimate that their numbers have halved since 1994.

In February of this year, the Minister of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, Thoko Didiza, proposed an amendment to the Meat Safety Act to include a number of wild animals, including giraffes, rhinos and elephants.

This month, the Victorian government announced on-the-spot fines for trespassers on farms following an upper house inquiry into how animal activism affects agriculture.

There is no escaping the fact the mechanisms driving CITES are categorically failing the species that the treaty was enacted to protect. 

Scientists have conducted one of the world’s first studies into the entire genome sequence of lions to reveal the evolutionary history of living and extinct lion species.