Piecing the timeline back together with confessions from local hunting guides, Palmer returned over 10 hours later to finish the job. A failed first “hunt” in the middle of the night ended with an arrow hitting its mark on Cecil, leaving him mortally wounded but not dead. The monitoring team set out to investigate, revealing Cecil’s grim fate and a murky set of circumstances including the intentional use of an elephant carcass as bait to lure Cecil out of the park. It suddenly stopped transmitting GPS data for two days and then blinked back to life, only to stop again after travelling a relatively short distance for a lion.
It was his collar that alerted the team of lion monitors that something was amiss. Cecil was one of 42 collared male lions in the park who was monitored daily over 8 years by researchers only for his life to come to a slow, painful and unnatural end on July 2, 2015. He was the park’s main attraction and was habituated to vehicles, making him a favorite of visiting photographers and safari guests. Cecil, a collared male lion whose home was Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe - the dominant male and most “handsome” of his pride - was lured out of the park to be illegally hunted by American dentist Walter Palmer.Ĭecil, then 12 years old, had both a name and a collar. It was five years ago today that the name “Cecil the Lion” reverberated around the planet in a collective outpouring of sadness, anger and disgust.
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