Libanon – 11. 02. 2025

Digital trophies: new study reveals extent of wildlife crime in Lebanon using photos from social media

Beirut/Cambridge. The Cambridge University Press has published a ground-breaking new peer-reviewed paper regarding the scale and impact of illegal bird poaching in Lebanon. The study appears in the X-edition of Oryx – The International Journal of Conservation – and focuses on the detailed analysis of 1,844 trophy-pictures published by Lebanese hunters on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. In a months-long process, wildlife crime experts from the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) have analysed and identified a total of 29,542 individual shot birds belonging to 212 bird species, ranging from eagles and vultures to swallows and blackcaps.

The vast majority of trophies posted by the hunters were migratory species that are protected under Lebanese law, and 19 of the species are listed as threatened or near threatened on the IUCN Red List. Thirty-three per cent have a decreasing population trend in Europe, highlighting the impact that illegal hunting is having on these migratory species. Although a broad range of bird species are targeted, the authors found that raptors are disproportionately affected. We identified 35 raptor species in the images, including significant numbers of the European honey-buzzard and Eurasian sparrowhawk. Hunters also proudly displayed other large species such as storks, pelicans and cranes, and sometimes hundreds of dead birds were piled up in a single photograph.

“Many of these images are truly shocking and we were appalled by what we observed and often found the photos difficult to look at, as they often included elements of extreme cruelty and torture remorselessly on display”, said lead author Dr. Andre Raine. He added that many of the photos and posts reviewed by his team were also reported to the Lebanese authorities responsible to enforce the hunting law. “Unfortunately we have not seen much specific action taken against the culprits”, Raine continued.

To help Lebanese authorities and conservationists to tackle the problem CABS is working together with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon (SPNL) and the Middle Eastern Sustainable Hunting Centre (MESHC). One of the core elements of this cooperation was the establishment of a professional and dedicated Anti-Poaching Unit (APU) which documents and reports cases of illegal hunting in close cooperation with the Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF) and other relevant authorities. CABS announced that a group of international experts will travel to Lebanon in April and September this year to assist the APU in documenting, reporting and exposing cases of wildlife crime in bird migration hotspots and bottleneck areas such as the mountains of the Akkar and North-Lebanon governorates.

Contact for more information: CABS Press Officer Axel Hirschfeld (co-author of the paper), phone +49 179 4803805 or Email to CABS@komitee.de

The article ‘Digital trophies: using social media to assess wildlife crime in Lebanon’ is available open access in Oryx—The International Journal of Conservation

A blog article about the study has been published here.

The cooperation of CABS, SPNL and MESHC is highlighted in the latest issue of SPNL´s Al-Hima magazine