This practise was soon to be known as “Canned Hunting” and since its exposure by the Cooke Report not too much has changed in South Africa, over the last five years there has been a dramatic increase in the establishment of new breeding facilities.

From government’s side they have mostly ignored the pleas of the local and international animal welfare communities that indeed the hunting of “Canned Lions” should be outlawed and banned altogether. Various animal rights groups in South Africa have attempted to go the legal route and bring court applications to stop Canned hunting, but unfortunately going the legal route is very costly and not within the financial capabilities of most animal welfare organisations.

To help the true victims here, who obviously are the lions themselves, one needs to understand the complex nature of the problem. The captive lion breeding projects were started mostly without the permission of the conservation departments, but when it reached alarming proportions and the public in general started hearing about the horrible shooting of captive bred and human imprinted lions, it was already to late to stop the monster. The lion breeders had already established a huge industry and were not going to let up without a heck of a fight and serious legal implications for the conservation departments. Threats of lawsuits came up and the conservation department were faced with the problem of dealing with the situation.

Many of the lion breeders indeed claimed that they were breeding lions for conservation purposes, which to this day, needs to be proven to me personally. I have not seen the conservation aspect neither have the arguments that I have heard, convinced me that indeed there is a need to breed lions in South Africa for hunting purposes. It is my personal opinion that the hunting of any captive bred animal is cruel and inhumane. I do believe people have a terrible obsession with collecting animal trophies and rare plants and that this obsession poses a serious threat to human decency and compassion.

To blame each other and constantly pass the buck, will not solve the problem and indeed just serve to demoralise individual members of our conservation and criminal investigation departments as not all of them are irresponsible and not interested in their work. We have realised in our cooperation with various departments that indeed there are those that will crawl through the desert on their hands and knees without any water and will within their allocated powers do anything necessary to protect our natural fauna and flora. Unfortunately it is also so, that in a world with growing human needs and demands, funding for conservation has become scarce, especially in the case of “Canned Lions”.

Lion breeders will spend millions on setting up their projects as the financial returns are astronomical, but on the flip side of the coin, is the fact that if one wants to raise funds to help the victims of this terrible industry, the support is few and far between and if it does come, the price tag attached demands a hell of a lot.

To solve the problem of “Canned Lions” is not going to be easy and personally I do hope the government will outlaw the practise altogether, but that remains to be seen and at the moment I am not too confident that it will ever happen. However I have been wrong before.

In our efforts to try and find a solution to the problem we discovered that many lions are held illegally today and that indeed the conservation department would be interested to remove such animals if they had a facility available for such purposes. We approached our local conservation officers and offered to raise funds and make such a facility available. To our joy they accepted and last week the first 6 lions arrived at SanWild, but we only now realised that indeed this is only the beginning.

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