WARNING! SOME IMAGES MAY HURT THE READER'S SENSITIVITY.
Sawubona Adventurers! In this new blog entry and the first one in English, I bring you a somewhat tricky, sad and hair-raising topic... Canned hunting is a tourist phenomenon that in recent years has gained a lot of popularity in South Africa and is seriously endangering the conservation of the lion and some other species.
I will divide the canned hunting into 3 phases, to be able to explain it better:
Phase 1, “Cub Petting”:
Many places (lodges, hotels, road zoos, sanctuaries) in Africa, offer tourists photographs with lion cubs (and sometimes other species) How many of us have wanted to have a photo with a cub? It would be fabulous for Instagram, it would look great as a profile photo... we were dazzled by that moment, a baby lion to be given a bottle or played with like a kitten. But we don't stop to ask ourselves questions like, where did he or she come from? Why are there so many? What's gonna happen when he or she grows up?
These cubs come out of farms that provide animals for this industry: the cubs are taken away from their mothers within hours of birth and fed by bottle. This is done with a double objective: on the one hand, to raise animals used to humans, and on the other, to make the mothers quickly fertile again.
The people in charge of these centres charge about 5 euros and ensure that the animals are reintroduced into the wild. They are also an excellent excuse to do volunteer programs, where young foreigners, in their great majority, usually pay for falsely believing that they are helping these places to raise lions and then release them into the wild. These centres can charge about two thousand euros for three months of volunteering in their centres. For these reasons, before we get infatuated and just think how beautiful a picture with a cub of any kind of animal would be, we must find out very well what its future is going to be and if what they are telling us really makes sense, since one of the main reasons for the disappearance or decrease of species is the lack of habitat so it doesn´t make sense to claim that they are going to be released.
Phase 2, walks with young lions:
This phase is similar to the previous one, the lions do not feed on a bottle anymore, they are teenagers, some of them are very playful and others are already starting to show their behaviour as wild animals. This is when the centres invite tourists to take walks on their grounds with groups of them, always with keepers watching and with sticks in case any lion gets cranky.
Not all of these sites that offer interaction with animals as in phase 1 and 2 have facilities to offer phase 3 or want to get involved in the media, so when the lions approach adulthood they sell them to farms or centres that can trade with them.
Phase 3, lion à la carte:
This is the last phase, they are now adult lions and lionesses. Both the males and the females (only the prettiest and healthiest) will be posted on the websites of these centres and according to their size and colour (it can vary from dark brown to white) they will have one price or another. The females as long as they are not bought are also used for breeding, and so they always have cubs to keep the business going in phase 1 and 2.
In the following video we can see how an undercover journalist for the documentary "Blood Lions: Bred for the bullet", informs himself to hire a canned game.
The term "canned hunting" refers to the small spaces where hunting takes place and where, as is easy to imagine, the hunter is not likely to miss the target, the most popular claim when selling this activity is "No-kill, no pay: If you don't kill, you don't pay".
These hunters are attracted by the guaranteed success since you do not need experience as a hunter and by the prices offered: if hunting a wild lion in Tanzania can cost almost 60,000 euros (hunting safaris can last up to 35 days and they do not guarantee that you will hunt it), doing it with this modality is worth between 6,000 and 45,000 euros. This has caused the number of lion trophies exported from South Africa in recent years to increase from 1,830 between 2001 and 2006 to 4,062 between 2006 and 2011, a 122% increase.
Once a hunter chooses his lion from the menu, this one leaves it´s cage just a few days, or even a few hours, before the hunt to a fenced site of a couple of hectares. When the hunter arrives, the animals are often under the effects of tranquillizers or are in the same place where it has had been used to being fed in the previous days. The hunter is taken in a safari car to where the lion or lioness is located so that he can hunt it with a firearm and even a crossbow, which he probably learned to use on previous days.
The Americans and Europeans (Spain is the 1st country in Europe that consumes more canned hunting) are the ones who mostly consume this type of hunting but the success of canned hunting is also growing in Asia, where there is a great demand for lion parts for traditional medicine.
Today the tourism industry may benefit economically from the hunters who come to South Africa, but in the long run, it is very likely that local populations who live from tourism will be severely affected. On the one hand because of the bad image the country is gaining internationally, and on the other because if in recent years the lion population has dropped by 40%... What will happen when the animal that is the symbol of this country becomes extinct? How many tourists will stop travelling to South Africa?, the solution to this very serious problem lies with the governments, since they are the ones who can prohibit the import of hunting trophies from countries like South Africa, and it is in our hands that people learn and see the horror of this industry so that the more people know about it, the more governments will respond. Countries like Australia, France and the Netherlands have already done so... Let's hope that Spain will do so soon.
We can fight for them from any country, let's be the voice of the voiceless, let's tell the world their story. Let's not let the lion roar for the last time.
Impilo enh adventurers.
P.S.: I recommend the documentary "Blood Lions, bred for the bullet", to go deeper into the subject.
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