No, Lions Did NOT Kill Five Poachers in Zimbabwe

The claims in the report are untrue. No such attack has been reported by any credible news outlet. The story comes from the notorious fake-news website World News Daily Report. Nothing published on the site should be taken seriously.

According to a ‘news’ report that is making its way around the Internet via social media, five poachers have been killed and three severely injured when a pride of lions attacked them. The report claims that the lions attacked while the men were illegally hunting for elephants in a Zimbabwean national park. The post features an image that supposedly depicts one of the injured men.

Some might consider such an animal attack fitting payback for a group of poachers.

But, in fact, the story is a work of fiction. No credible news outlet has reported any such attack. And, the story comes from the fake-news ‘satirical’ website World News Daily Report (WNDR). Over the last several years, WNDR has been responsible for a seemingly endless stream of nonsense tricked up as news. Nothing published on the site should be taken seriously. It includes the following disclaimer in its About Us section:

WNDR assumes however all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle.

The photograph used in the fake report has no connection to a lion attack. According to various online reports from 2015, the picture shows a man with ‘female-like’ breasts who approached a prophet for help.

It is wise to verify any strange or unusual ‘news’ stories that come your way via social media before you share them with others.