Today we mourn the passing of Derek Cattani, a much loved member of the LionAid Board of Trustees, who died on Monday this week.
Derek has been a LionAid Trustee since April 2019 and a Director of the charity since 2022.
He worked tirelessly alongside us to try and help save the iconic lion from its relentless slide into extinction.
He was actively involved in our project work in rural Kenya right up to the end of his life, helping us find innovative solutions to mitigate the human/wildlife conflict that results in the deaths of far too many wild lions.
We are all very proud of the fact that since our project started in Merrueshi community, Kenya in September 2022, not a single lion or other predator has been killed in retaliation for livestock losses across the Merrueshi ecosystem.
This project has reached a critical stage and we very much need to raise another £5,000 to take this project into the next phase where it starts to become truly sustainable across the entire Merrueshi ecosystem, bringing many more manyattas (villages) in to the scheme, benefitting impoverished rural communities as well as continuing to save lions and other predators from the retaliatory conflict that used to plague the area before the project began .