Lions are the major tourist attraction in Kenya's game parks, along with elephants, buffaloes, leopards and rhinos.

Kenya, heavily reliant on tourist dollars, has lost an average of 100 lions in each of the last seven years, with the population down from 2,749 lions in 2002 to some 2,000 now, the KWS said.

"The trend of lion population decline is disturbing and every effort needs to be made to ensure that Kenya either stabilises its population at the current 2,000 lions or increases the numbers to an ecologically acceptable level," KWS said in a statement.

It says it has tracking devices fitted on five lions to monitor their movement and better understand the human-lion conflict in the southern Amboseli ecosystem.

The southern Tsavo National Park - famous for a pair of man-eating lions that devoured scores of railway construction workers by dragging them from their tents at night in the 1890s - has only 675 lions, KWS said.

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