South Africa’s canned lion hunting industry has been dealt yet another PR blow, with the contentious breeding of captive-bred lions and the horrors they endure detailed painfully in Lord Ashcroft’s new book, Unfair Game. The book is the latest in a series of exposés seeking to convince government to scrap its quota on lion bones and parts allowed to leave the country.
Part of the book even compares those engaged in canned hunting to serial killers, exhibiting the same lack of emotion when witnessing the traumatic and disturbing deaths lions must endure, for their parts to become trophies for hunters.The canned lion industry is the circle of life that lions are born into. Cubs are ripped away from their mothers hours after birth, to be petted and bottle-fed by tourists, explains HSI-Africa wildlife director Audrey Delsink.
“Volunteerism facilities offering physical animal interactions also pose a significant threat to human safety and public liability,” Delsink lamented.As of May 2018, the department of environmental affairs said that since 1996, 40 people were either injured or killed at captive carnivore facilities in South Africa. The most common attacks took place while people were inside the camps with carnivores, with at least 24 of these incidents taking place over the past 22 years.
“Therefore, the reputation damage to South Africa and the cost to our tourism… especially in the wake of Covid-19, is a far greater risk that our country can least afford,” said Delsink. Delsink explained that in a report submitted to the 18th meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora , big cat scientists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature warned of the potentially devastating impact to wild lions.
This is in stark contradiction to Lord Ashcroft’s, and HSI-Africa’s views that captive-bred lions do not add to the conservation value of an area whatsoever, and the likelihood of re-wilding captive-bred lions that have experienced trauma and abuse is very slim. The likely outcome of most captive-bred lions, should the industry be scrapped, would be euthanasia.
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