The demand for traditional medicine is fuelling big cat farms in South Africa and Asia where lion and tiger cubs are born into a life of captivity.
South Africa is one of the few countries in Africa that allows the intensive captive breeding and keeping of lions and other big cats for commercial purposes.
The trade in lion bones is supplementing the demand for tiger bones and creating a bigger problem for tiger conservation. With fewer than 4,000 tigers left in the wild, every conservation effort to protect these predators in their natural habitat needs global support.