Lion hunters move in for kill to supply Chinese medicine market

One lion rests in a pile of dry leaves, his golden mane shining amid the tawny scrub of the forest. A few metres away a lioness fixes her pale yellow eyes on a small group of tourists taking photographs.

The sight of lions in their natural habitat is always mesmerising, but particularly so in Gir Forest National Park in Gujarat, because this is the last place in the world where the Asiatic lion lives wild. The subspecies, which has a smaller mane than its African counterpart, once roamed throughout Asia, from eastern India to Palestine. Today, however, only about 350 survive outside zoos - all in this patch of scrubby forest in western India.

Compared with India's tigers, the world's surviving wild Asiatic lions have received little attention from the media or tourists, even though they are rarer. This may be because, whereas tigers have been wiped out in parts of the subcontinent by poachers who sell their body parts for use in Chinese medicine, Asiatic lions have traditionally lived a less perilous existence.

Occasionally they are killed because they have attacked cattle and some have been poached for their claws, which are used as good luck charms, but they have not been under as much threat as the tiger.

Until now.

During the past two months, eight of Gir's lions have been found dead, some in heavy steel traps, some stabbed, all with their bones and claws missing. The sight has horrified conservationists because it suggests that for the first time India's lions are also being killed to provide ingredients for the booming Chinese medicine market.