How can South Africa, with its incredibly beautiful and diverse landscapes that are teeming with wildlife, condone canned hunting?
It’s bad enough that rangers put their lives at risk daily to protect animals from poachers and that hunting organizations thrive on trophy hunting in wild surroundings. But canned hunting takes this barbaric ‘sport’ even further over the line of cruelty and morality.
In Born Free’s video The Bitter Bond, the plight of just one innocent lion is highlighted. You start watching it with a warm and fuzzy feeling that’s replaced with upset and anger at the end. Because it’s not just an animated video created from someone’s imagination — this is the real plight of thousands of animals, mostly lions, for profit and entertainment.
What Is Canned Hunting?
Lion cubs are bred in captivity, taken away from their mothers at just a few days old and hand-raised to get them used to human interaction. Unsuspecting volunteers pay to help raise them, believing the cubs to be rescued orphans.
They bottle-feed the adorable cubs under the impression that their cash is helping a conservation organization and the cubs will eventually be released back into the wild.
When the cubs are a little bigger, they’re cuddled by well-meaning tourists who pay to have selfies taken with them and then, as adolescents, the lions roam around freely with tourists who enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime walking with lions experience. The unsuspecting tourists believe they too are paying a conservation organization and the lions they walk with are free and happy in their environment.
What they don’t realize, however, is that when the lions are big enough, they’re moved into confined areas where trophy hunters pay to get their thrills killing these innocent animals with no way for them to escape. As the lions are tame, there’s also no threat to the hunters who take pleasure in shooting their unsuspecting and confined prey. Cowardly and barbaric, it’s hard to understand how anyone can have pride in their bloodied ‘trophy’.
After these paying hunters have had their fill of photos with their ‘heroic’ kill and taken their souvenir from the now lifeless corpse – usually its head or skin – the animal’s other body parts and bones are then sold too, this time to international markets.
It’s hard to believe that in a country filled with so much wildlife, the cruel business of canned hunting is thriving. Tourists pay huge sums for the privilege of seeing animals in their natural environment while on safari, including majestic lions and their playful cubs within close proximity, yet the South African government continues to let the canned hunting industry grow — why? Profit. It’s as simple as that.
Why Does It Continue?
The South African government has confirmed the canned hunting industry is purely profit-based and there’s no benefit for wildlife conservation. It’s under pressure from the international community to shut it down and even hunting organizations are opposed to canned hunting.
At every stage of a lion’s life, money is to be made. Captive breeding facilities make big money from the feeding, petting and walking with lions experiences, and the canned hunting facilities earn their bucks from trophy hunters looking for an easy kill. But more than that, both aspects of the industry make huge amounts of profit from the bone trade. It’s a very lucrative business.
The gruesome business of selling lions’ skeletons fuels an ever-increasing trade with Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, Laos and Thailand as well as China, where bones are highly sought after as an ingredient for so-called medicinal products, glue and wine — yes, you read that correctly, bone wine is big business.
While these countries have extensive breeding farms for lions and tigers to fulfil this market, South Africa actually has a unique ‘skeleton quota’ allowing the legal exportation of lion bones to these Asian countries.
It’s such a huge and profitable business that it’s an industry in its own right rather that being a by-product of trophy hunting. So while canned hunting contributes the skeletons to South Africa’s legal quota, the government is unlikely to put a stop to this shameful practice.
What You Can Do
- Don’t support so-called eco-tourism activities, such as walking with lions, or pay to have your photo taken with lion cubs.
- Help raise awareness about canned hunting by sharing posts like this one and Born Free’s The Bitter Bond video on social media.
- Sign and share this petition to help stop lion farming and canned hunting.
Photo credits:
Lion cub by pogo_mm on Pixabay
Video credits:
