{"id":435577,"date":"2026-02-20T05:54:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T05:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/435577\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T05:54:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T05:54:08","slug":"lion-dna-convicts-poachers-in-world-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/435577\/","title":{"rendered":"Lion DNA convicts poachers in world first"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Over the last eight years the Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust (VFWT) has received about \u00a3250,000 from the People&#8217;s Postcode Lottery in the UK to build up the DNA database of lions in Zimbabwe.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The scientist at the trust, who made the discovery, asked to remain anonymous for his own safety, but said:<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Before we had access to this technology, we were only able to do species identification, but sometimes that&#8217;s not enough.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We can essentially match those claws or those products to the lion of interest that we are looking for.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Within 10 days of the killing, the DNA evidence was presented in court.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Two men pleaded guilty and were given 24 month prison sentences.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The hearing was told the value of the lion was about $20,000.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Richard Scobey, Traffic&#8217;s executive director, said &#8220;countries now have the forensic capability to bring, solid science-based evidence to court&#8221; and that it will have global impact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the last eight years the Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust (VFWT) has received about \u00a3250,000 from the People&#8217;s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-435577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}