5 September - 'I Love Animals, That's Why I Hunt'

This sentence was spoken by a hunter in a film we saw this morning about the lion industry in South Africa. I feel it captures the cynicism of the industry perfectly, and make no mistake it is an industry and one that I was woefully ignorant of before I arrived. I have been lucky enough to see these animals in the wild; born there, raised there and left without human intervention. But there is a massive industry in breeding lions in this country under the banner of conservation. You can even pay to have a conservation holiday helping raise the young cubs. Does this help conservation of this wonderful animal in any way? The answer is a resounding no. Born in captivity and raised there by eager volunteers and not their mothers (once her cubs are removed she will go into oestrus and be able to produce more cubs instead of spending two years raising those she has just given birth to), these young cubs can never be introduced into the wild.

So what is their destiny? Firstly they will raised in 'education centres' where people like you and me can pet and cuddle them to satisfy our own needs for contact with cute 'wild' animals. After this, once they are more fully grown, they continue to be used in the tourist industry providing the opportunity to do a 'lion walk' which is exactly what it sounds like, walking with grown lions in the bush with plenty of opportunity for those great instagram and Facebook photographs. The final stage is the worst. As fully grown animals, unscarred by the fighting that they would have experienced in the wild, they make great trophies and end up as somebody's sport in 'canned hunting'. This phrase describes a practice here where an animal is set up to be killed, it can hardly be called a hunt: it takes place in a small area with no escape opportunity for the animal; the animals can be drugged to pacify them; and they are often lured to a specific site rather than tracked. The organisers guarantee you a 'kill' and you even choose the lion you wish to hunt from a selection before heading out so the necessary arrangements can be made. The hunting community see the breeding of lions as helping increase their numbers but the bred animals would never survive if released into the wild (which is not going to happen) and the breeding stock has so diluted its own gene pool that they would add no value to the wild anyway. They are bred to be killed. Of course not every conservation organisation is part of this machine and some allow their lions to see out their days in captivity if release into the wild is not realistic. But any organisation that allows breeding in captivity has serious questions to answer and next year it is estimated that the machine that churns them out will produce 20,000 lions for hunting.

There are some areas for debate I am sure but for me the facts do not add up. It has been a sobering and enlightening morning.