5 New Developments in the Killing of Cecil the Lion

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3. Cecil the Lion’s “brother” Jericho alive and well despite rumors

The Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force announced on its Facebook page Saturday that Cecil’s “brother” Jericho was shot and killed by a poacher. Those rumors turned out to be false for two reasons: one, the lion in question was perfectly fine and two, Jericho is not Cecil’s blood brother, but “rather a partner in a ‘coalition’ of a kind often formed by unrelated male lions to better compete for territory and prides,” the director of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford told The Guardian. Still, the task force said in their follow up post that another “lion has in fact been killed,” just not the one that they thought it was.

4. Many are urging the U.S. to put the African lion on the endangered species list

Although adding the African lion would not outright ban trophy hunting in Africa, it would require a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in order to be able to bring the lion or its body parts back into the country and that permit would only be issued if “the agency determined that importing a lion or parts of it would not be harmful to the survival of the species, Tanya Sanerib, at Center for Biological Diversity told Reuters.

The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the African lion as endangered last year. Fifty Democrats in the House of Representatives sent a letter on Thursday to the service asking it to finalize listing the lion as endangered.

5. Cecil the Lion lit up the Empire State Building over the weekend

#CecilTheLion honored in @EmpireStateBldg light show: http://t.co/9VwgQakHtR pic.twitter.com/0Sk3jQltBB

— CNN International (@cnni) August 3, 2015

On Saturday, documentary filmmakers of Racing Extinction projected a loop of images of endangered animals on the Empire State Building to raise awareness about how we are in the midst of the planet’s sixth mass extinction and humans are to blame. The filmmakers held a similar event last September on the day before the People’s Climate March and two days before the UN Climate Summit.

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