Kaplan and his wife Dafna helped establish a felid conservation program at Oxford University in collaboration with David MacDonald. In 2009, the couple endowed the Recanati-Kaplan Center at Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, the WildCRU, and the university's Postgraduate Diploma in International Wildlife Conservation Practice, which offers young conservationists from developing countries access to training at Oxford. In February 2012, Oxford's WildCRU was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in recognition of WildCRU's outstanding work in wildlife and environmental conservation. In July 2015, a trophy hunter killed Cecil the lion, who was being studied by the WildCRU's Kaplan-funded Hwange Lion Research Project in Zimbabwe.
