MacroSnaps15 September 2026
No. 66Africa's lions have collapsed to rhino numbers, about 23,000 of each. Get all the wild lions on the continent and they would fit in a quarter of Wembley football stadium.
Elephant
391,000
down from 471,800 in 2006
Giraffe
140,700
up from 97,600 in 2015
Lion
23,000
down from 33,300 in 2006
Rhino
22,500
up from 21,700 in 2007
Cheetah
7,000
down 37% since 2008
Wild dog
6,600
falling, 2012 estimate
The latest full count of each, with the direction its own assessors report: red falling, green rising. Elephants outnumber lions seventeen to one. The counts are not all comparable. The giraffe jump is mostly better surveying rather than 40,000 more giraffe, and nobody has recounted cheetah or wild dogs since 2007 and 2012.
Why this is happening
- Africa runs about 400 million cattle, roughly 17,000 for every lion, much of it on land that was savanna. A lion that takes one gets shot or poisoned, because cattle are a household's savings, not just its dinner.
- Even inside parks the prey is being stripped out by commercial snaring for bushmeat. A reserve can look like wilderness on a map, hold almost no antelope or zebra, and quietly starve its lions out.
- The parks themselves are broke. Those holding lions need about $1,300 a square kilometre a year to be run properly and get a median of about $200. Across Africa that is a shortfall of about $1.5bn a year.
The take
Lions now survive where somebody pays for them. Numbers rise in only four countries, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, and what they share is money, not fences: South Africa runs small fenced reserves, Botswana runs open wilderness nobody could fence, and both work. Everywhere else the line falls, on land already down to 6% of the lion's old range. Most of Africa cannot afford the bill.