What's A Dead Lion Worth?

Can you put a dollar value on a lion? It would be difficult to express the worth of a living lion in monetary terms; there are too many variables. Let’s just go ahead and call a living lion priceless. But how about a dead lion? What’s a dead lion worth?

Luckily for us we can, with a minimum of background information, arrive at a figure that is pretty accurate.

For decades, South Africa maintained a multimillion dollar lion breeding industry, with some 350 facilities scattered throughout the country, housing at any one time between 8,000 and 12,000 captive lions. The lions were sold to zoos, to companies that offered children a chance to pet cubs, to canned hunting operations (where cowardly rich assholes pay to shoot a “ferocious wild beast” that has been caged in a small enclosure for their “hunting” convenience) and lastly, lion skeletons were exported to China for use in traditional medicine.

Captive-Bred Lions

Photo by Karl Ammonn

South Africa was granted special permission for the practice at the 2016 CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) conference held in Johannesburg (go figure), and a quota was set for 800 lions. Upon arrival in China, each carcass was boiled, to remove the last vestiges of meat and gristle, as well as to soften the bone, which was then pulverized into a powder that was rendered into 60 bars of so-called “tiger cake.”

Surely it goes without saying, but in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) tiger cake is made up of powdered bone from, you know, tigers. However, unbeknownst to many consumers of tiger cake, the bone meal is many times that of lions (the skeletons are virtually impossible to tell apart), because tigers are increasingly difficult to come by. (Which is the subject for a whole other conversation, as are the superstitious underpinnings of TCM.)

Chinese importers paid the South African government roughly $1600 per lion carcass. So, South Africa made a tidy profit of approximately $1,280,000 for 800 dead lions. Not a bad chunk of change, but the money spigot has only just been opened. Each of those 60 bars of tiger cake sells for $1000, which translates to a value of $60,000 for each dead lion. Which means that the initial shipment of 800 lion carcasses realized a downstream value of $48 million.

$48 million is an enormous pile of money, even in this cash-bloated country. In the four countries that slurp up the most tiger cake – China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand – $48 million is an amount of money so gigantic it must seem like fiction. Sadly (if that’s the right word), the ordinary impoverished citizens of those countries rarely if ever see a single cent of the dead-lion money. No, that money lines the pockets of a vanishingly small number of old, rich men who, like all rich old men, hoard the stuff like it’s their very reason for existence. Which it usually is.

Tiger Cake 
Photo by Karl Ammonn

In the end, it turns out that lion, after spending it short life caged in squalor and misery is, once it has been shot, worth, minimally, in the neighborhood of $60,000.

But there is some hope on the horizon. On May 2 of this year, the South African government announced that it intends to end its captive breeding industry, and that it will officially oppose the illegal international trade in rhinoceros horn and elephant ivory, two things it has not done before now. They are also going to put a stop to the hunting of caged lions (canned hunts). Granted, they are banning the revolting practice in order to promote a “more authentic hunting industry,”* but at least the pathetic dipshits who engage in the activity will have to actually put down their scotch and get out of their air-conditioned Hummer limos to shoot something magnificent.

Talk with you soon.

 

*ABC News, May 2, 2021.