The African lion is the iconic symbol of Africa, king of beasts and famous member of the BIG 5. This king, however, is endangered – the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) states that Africa’s lions have undergone a population reduction of approximately 43 % within the past 21 years and estimates that only around 23,000 individuals roam the continent today – with decreasing population trend.
In South Africa, the lion faces additional threat from a multi-million dollar industry, which just emerged in recent times: lion farms. Currently, there are about 200 farms and breeding facilities all over the country holding somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 predators in captivity. The vast majority, possibly as many as 7,000 of these, are lions. This is more than double the number of the remaining wild lion population in South Africa, which is currently estimated to be merely 2,500 - 3,000 individuals. Many of these facilities claim to contribute to protection of the species by breeding and releasing animals into the wild or by taking care of orphaned lion cubs.
These claims, however, are, in fact, far from the truth.
Lions on these farms are rather part of a well-organized business, which has identified the mass production of lions for different, mostly touristic industries, as a highly profitable source of income. Conservationists and animal welfare experts remain deeply concerned about the breeding practices used and the general conditions that exist on many of these lion farms.
With only a few days after birth, lion cubs are taken away from their mothers. This highly traumatizing process for both sides aims at bringing the lionesses into a new reproductive circle as quickly as possible. The cubs are used in the volunteering industry as “orphaned” lion babies that can be cuddled and hand-reared by motivated but often misinformed young adults – most of them believing that the cubs will be re-wilded once they are fully grown. Growing older, the sub-adult animals are used for “walk-a-lion” experiences for tourists and volunteers until they get too large and too dangerous to remain in this sector.
However, as opposed to the advertisement of many volunteering farms raising lions, these animals can never be released into the wild due to their habituation to human beings and the fact that they are often carrying genetic illnesses. This means that these animals have no conservational value at all and only satisfy the greed for profit of the farm operators.
And thus, many of the adult animals are redirected into the canned hunting industry – an industry where human-imprinted lions are “hunted” in confined areas leaving them no fair chance to escape. Alternatively, lions are sold to feed the growing lion bone market in Asia, serving as a substitute for tiger products in the Chinese Traditional Medicine.