Tourists lured to South Africa to take part in trophy hunts

By: Joanna Della-Ragione

THE lion cub in my arms is just two months old. His dappled yellow fur is cotton-wool soft and his long lashed eyes glow gold. He is calendar-cute, picture perfect, but when he scrambles out of my arms razor-sharp claws scrape my skin and I'm jolted back to reality, reminded that he's a wild animal. That I'm able to cradle him at all is paradoxical.

This isn't nature or the expansive wilderness of the Kruger National Park - if it were the pride would have torn me limb from limb by now - rather I'm standing in a large cage, home to eight cubs including two baby tigers and two white lions who playfully nip my ankles. The pungent scent of cat urine rising from the dusty ground permeates the air.

I've driven three hours from Johannesburg across vast expanses of bleak farmland which constitute South Africa's Orange Free State, down a nausea-inducing dirt track to the Moreson Ranch, which markets itself as a "holiday and game farm" where rich hunters both amateur and professional come to shoot animals for sport. It is just one of many lionbreeding farms in South Africa where tourists can pay a mere 50 rand (about $5.80) to cuddle a cub.

What the tourists aren't told is that these cubs have been snatched from their mothers at just an hour old and come adulthood they're likely to die at the hands of wealthy trophy hunters, just like the rest of the 5,000 captive bred lions in South Africa.

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Lions are critically endangered in West Africa

A report published today concludes that the African lion is facing extinction across the entire West African region. The West African lion once ranged continuously from Senegal to Nigeria, but the new paper reveals there are now only an estimated 250 adult lions restricted to four isolated and severely imperiled populations. Only one of those populations contains more than 50 lions.

Led by Panthera's Lion Program Survey Coordinator, Dr. Philipp Henschel, and co-authored by a team from West Africa, the UK, Canada and the United States, the paper The lion in West Africa is critically endangered was published yesterday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. The report's sobering results represent a massive survey effort taking six years and covering eleven countries where lions were presumed to exist in the last two decades. The new, very fine resolution information builds on an earlier continent-wide review of lion status produced by Duke University, to which Dr. Henschel also contributed. Both surveys received funding from National Geographic's Big Cats Initiative (BCI).

Panthera's Dr. Philipp Henschel explained, "When we set out in 2006 to survey all the lions of West Africa, the best reports suggested they still survived in 21 protected areas. We surveyed all of them, representing the best remaining lion habitat in West Africa. Our results came as a complete shock; all but a few of the areas we surveyed were basically paper parks, having neither management budgets nor patrol staff, and had lost all their lions and other iconic large mammals."

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Becoming King: Why So Few Male Lions Survive to Adulthood

The first sight of wild lions is stirring, for a number of reasons. The cubs themselves are adorable, but the adults — each of which easily outweighs an offensive linemen and sports paws the size of small dinner plates — elicit a sort of tense wonder consisting of awe, respect for these powerful beasts, and something resembling fear but more like an awareness of one's mortality. They could easily kill us. But there are no words in the moment besides exclamations of disbelief.

But none of that matters to the lions, who live on this land and don't seem to pay any attention to visitors, driven about in a couple of Toyota Land Cruisers that are completely open to the air, no windows for separation.

The lion cubs seem happy and carefree, but their lives are not easy. Only about 1 in 8 male lions survive to adulthood, Dereck said.

Tough childhood

All lions face high mortality as cubs, for a variety of reasons, including injuries, lack of food, illness and being killed by adult lions — more on that later. But when male lions begin to reach sexual maturity around age 2, the older males within the pride kick them out, Dereck said. The female lions, which are usually all related to some degree, typically stay behind.

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