World Animal Protection Condemns Killing of 11 Lions in Queen Elizabeth National Park .

BY SAMUEL NABWIISO

World Animal Protection has strongly condemned the killing of 11 lions in Hamukungu in Uganda.  This comes at a time when lion’s population is on a steep decline with about 90 lions left in this park.

Edith Kabesiime, Wildlife Campaigns Manager says, the killing of the big cats will drastically affects the country’s tourism sector thus the need for the  government to come up with an agent solution to deal with the problem of Human to Lion conflicts.

“The death of a whole pride of 11 lions in Hamukungu at Queen Elizabeth National Park in Western Uganda, and similar deaths across Africa highlight how urgent it is to do all we can to prevent such needless decimation of the continent’s remaining big cats. Human-lion conflict should be treated as urgency and serious measures taken to stamp out this tit-for-tat mentality and practice.” She said in statement issued by World Animal Protection.

Edith  Kabesiime  of the World  Animal  Protection 

The comment by the Edith Kabesiime, Wildlife Campaigns Manager at World Animal Protection comes at time when the country’s tourism sector is in shock after the poisoning of 11 Lions in Queen Elizabeth National park in Western Uganda. According to Information the big cats were killed by cattle keepers who on routine basis’s grazes their livestock’s in the park, the cattle keepers blames the wild Animals especially big cats for attacking their cows.

Lions are some of the key tourism attraction’s that have been attracting tourists both International and Locals to visit Queen Elizabeth National Park.

In 2016, the direct contribution of Travel and Tourism to Uganda’s GDP was Shs 2.4 tn (USD0.7bn) and is forecast to rise by 7.0 percent per year, from 2017-2027, to Shs5,558.3bn (USD1.6bn), 3.2 percent of total GDP in 2027.

The same year, Tourism directly supported 191,000 jobs (2.2 percent of total employment) and this is expected to rise by 4.9 percent per year to 355,000 jobs (2.7 percent of total employment) in 2027.