Study finds widespread welfare concerns at SA’s captive lion venues - TimesLIVE

A peer-reviewed assessment of 34 captive lion tourism venues across SA has raised concerns about the welfare conditions experienced by lions kept in the commercial captive wildlife industry.

The study, conducted by Blood Lions and World Animal Protection, assessed facilities in Gauteng, Limpopo, Free State and North West provinces. Researchers visited the venues as paying members of the public to document the conditions and activities ordinarily experienced by visitors.

The venues catered for local and international tourists and offered activities including predator viewing, cub petting, bottle feeding and walking with lions.

Researchers assessed 10 welfare and husbandry indicators, including mobility, noise, shelter, hygiene, the naturalness of the environment, social interaction, enrichment, diet, the intensity of entertainment activities and animal management.

The assessment found welfare concerns across multiple aspects of the lions’ physical, environmental and behavioural conditions.

The researchers said the consistency of the concerns across the venues suggested the problems could not be explained as isolated cases of poor husbandry.

The study also found that two-thirds of the venues offered some form of animal-visitor interaction.

Venues that did not offer these interactions generally recorded better overall welfare conditions than those offering activities such as cub petting, bottle feeding and walking with lions.

However, Blood Lions campaign manager Dr Stephanie Klarmann cautioned that venues offering viewing-only experiences should not automatically be regarded as having good welfare conditions.

“For tourists, the most wildlife-friendly choice is to avoid captive wild animals and instead choose to view wildlife in their natural habitats,” she said.

Blood Lions managing director Dr Louise de Waal said the findings pointed to broader problems within a system where lions are kept for commercial purposes.

“When animals are kept within a system designed primarily around their commercial use, their management tends to be shaped by the needs of business and profit, rather than by what is best for the welfare of the animals under their control,” said de Waal.

The organisations said conditions at facilities that keep lions for other commercial purposes, including captive hunting, live exports and the trade in body parts, could be similar or worse than those documented at public-facing tourism venues.

South Africa is home to one of the world’s largest commercial captive lion industries, with nearly 8,000 lions kept at about 350 facilities, according to Blood Lions and World Animal Protection.

The organisations said lions can be used for different commercial purposes throughout their lives, with cubs used for petting and feeding experiences, adolescent animals for walking activities and older lions for breeding or captive trophy hunting.

Live lions are also exported to zoos and entertainment parks and for breeding, while their bones and other body parts can enter the wildlife trade after their death.

Blood Lions said the different uses form an interconnected commercial system in which individual lions can be commercially exploited at different stages of their lives.

The organisations said SA had been on a trajectory towards phasing out the commercial captive lion industry, and expressed hope that the findings would support the continuation of that process under minister David Maynier.