News & Updates

It is disappointing to see London Zoo downplay a potentially very serious incident. If reports are accurate, Kumbuka made his way through two unlocked doors and entered a keeper area to come face-to-face with one of the keepers. While it is good that some of the more sensationalist media reports have been corrected, the fact remains that this incident was significant and could have ended very differently.

With less than 4,000 tigers remaining globally, facing a myriad of threats in their forest homes, wild tigers need no added pressure. Sadly they face a little known but formidable threat, one which may yet spell their end in the wild: their captive breeding in large commercial enterprises in the infamous tiger ‘farms’ of China and Southeast Asia.

Scientific investigations have concluded that whales, dolphins and porpoises (collectively known as cetaceans) do not fare well in captivity, where the lack of space and complexity causes these intelligent animals to develop anxieties, abnormal behaviours and early mortality. These facts have recently been supported by 21 eminent marine biologists, who have signed a statement stating that science no longer justifies the use of cetaceans for entertainment purposes.

The Born Free Foundation is saddened to learn that a lion has been shot dead at Leipzig Zoo today. Reports indicate that two male lions, who had recently been transferred from Basel Zoo, had actually escaped from their enclosure this morning. It was during attempts to capture them that one of the lions was shot after efforts to tranquillise him, failed.

Protected Area Management Solutions: Interview with Wayne Lotter of PAMS - working to combat elephant poaching: Tell us about your job, your role and responsibilities: I am a founding director of a not-for-profit conservation organization based in Tanzania, which focuses primarily on wildlife protection. We support rangers, communities and governments to better protect wildlife from poachers and other criminals. We also collaborate with other like minded organizations to develop best practices and find solutions to challenges affecting wildlife. My primary strength is with strategy development.

‘These creatures are iconic and very precious. They’re the only ones we’ve got’ - John Cleese Legendary comedian, actor, writer, film producer and passionate conservationist, John Cleese, has sent a stark video message to delegates at the United Nations wildlife trade conference, CITES CoP17, which is taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa:

Regulations just published by the Norwegian government will effectively bring an end to the use of wild animals in circuses in Norway when they are implemented in January 2017. The Born Free Foundation has welcomed the news, which follows a series of false starts, whereby bans were mooted but fell by the wayside.

Born Free has welcomed a motion passed at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) World Conservation Congress encouraging governments globally to close their domestic markets for elephant ivory as a matter of urgency.

Born Free has today welcomed the findings of new genetic analysis published in the journal Current Biology that has unexpectedly found giraffes are not one species, but four.

On Sunday 4th September, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced that it had placed the Eastern Lowland Gorilla in its ‘Critically Endangered’ Red List category, meaning that the species faces an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild. This is the highest category of risk. The next category is ‘Extinct’.