The six girls at the Dollar Block release site have been mixed together and all are getting on well. Ashanti is maintaining her alpha female role, but this will need to be confirmed once released by our researchers. Due to the election, we have been forced to delay the release and are now hoping to action this on Sunday 13th. This will co-incide with one of our supporters running the London Marathon on that day in suport of the program. It is not known whether she will be wearing a lion suit whilst competing.

Our latest newsletter is now available. To get your copy please email alert@africanencounter.org, although we will making it available on our web page www.lionalert.org in the next few days. Apologies that our web site is not fully functional, but they are an expensive marketing item and everytime we feel ready to work on it more there are other financial priorities. We hope to improve this situation very soon.

Our newsletter this month features:

Stage One Update
- Amghela comes of age
- Mana & Nandi – a lizard, a crab and a very large bird
- Sango, Sahara & Swahili weaning
- Research walks continue
- The age old debate: Girls vs Boys
- Amanzi
- Landela does it again!
- All move….

A Day in the Life of a Lion Handler

Launch of our Ethical Fundraising Policy

And of course a commentary on the up-coming stage two release.

Also coming to our web page in the next few days is a supporters pack giving a range of ways that people can offer support to the program.

About two weeks ago I started work on a new information pack, a vastly expanded version of the pack currently available on our web page. This is an effort to draw together information that people have requested and was not sufficiently explained in the current version. It will include details of our community work as well as our conservation & research projects over and above the information about the lion release program. I hope this will help to answer the questions still remaining about the program. I hope to have this completed in the next two weeks and available from our web page; I will keep you posted

One thing has been clear from the discussions that I have had on many web sites is that those wishing to paint our program in a bad light do not generally bother to read our literature, preferring instead to make bold, inaccurate statements in order to paint a negative picture. These false statements are taken up by a world of people who also cannot be bothered to read anything longer than a Facebook sentence. The result is that we are being accused of taking longer to release lions by the very people who are reducing our chances of gaining sponsorship to action those releases. I am hoping that our improved information pack will offer an end to this, although at 51 pages and growing, I am aware that the complexities and above all scope involved in our program may be too much for many people to wade through.

I have been informed this morning that the Environmental Council of Zambia intends to hold a public meeting on 12th April at the David Livingstone College in Livingstone. I believe this will take place at around 9am but am awaiting confirmation of this. The meeting is to welcome discussion on the completed Environmental Impact Assessment conducted on our proposed release sites (2 x stage two and 1 x stage 3) in the Dambwa Forest. I do hope anyone with an interest in the project will be able to attend.