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The sordid canned hunting industry in South Africa has been dubbed “South Africa’s Dirty Little Secret”. It is a burgeoning industry that is beyond cruel for up to 8,000 captive bred lions, currently living on death row in South Africa.
The Industry works like this:
- 160 (and counting) lion breeding farms in South Africa
- Female lions are forced to produce up to three litters per year (one litter every 3 years is the norm in the wild).
- The cubs are removed shortly after birth and the mother is forced into the next pregnancy.
- The “orphaned” cubs are marketed by recruitment agencies in the UK, USA and worldwide to the “volunteer” market – unsuspecting people (in their droves) sign up to stay at these farms for two weeks or more (costing them circa £1,200 per fortnight plus their airfares). They are led to believe they are helping conservation and these cubs will be put back into the wild when they reach adulthood.
- At the farms, further income is generated from cub petting, photographing and walking with the lion cubs. The paying volunteers often avoiding the need for the farms to incur staffing costs to man the operation.
- Once the cubs reach maturity, the males (at about 3-4years) and the females (once they can no longer produce the new cubs in the “puppy mill” operation listed above) are sold the canned hunting operators.
- Canned hunting is where the human habituated lion is put into a field and a tourist hunter comes along in his landrover and shoots it dead. Sometimes the lion is partially anaesthetised beforehand. It offers no resistance. It is a tame lion. The lion is shot through the body (to preserve the trophy quality) and the lion often dies an agonising death, particularly if the tourist is a bad shot and has several “goes” to kill the lion.
- The tourist hunter goes home with his trophy and the lion carcass is sold into the lion bone trade for the Chinese Traditional Medicine market.
This is a lucrative growing industry and needs to be exposed and closed down. People need to be aware that “volunteering”, “walking with lions” “cub petting” are NOT what they seem. Simply by starving the demand for this part of the operation, we can severely dent the income streams of these operators at a time when they need income to feed the growing lions.
The South African Government is not listening to any welfare concerns and condones this industry. By cutting off these income streams, we can however effectively bring this sordid industry to its knees.
Here is a link to a recent blog written by Kevin Richardson in South Africa. Kevin is working very hard to expose this industry.
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