The Rhino and Lion reserve in South Africa has come under new management and the new management has taken the courageous step of deciding not to offer lion cub petting to tourist visitors any longer.

The reason of course is the difficulty that tourist facilities run into for when the cubs grow older, there is no market for them other than the canned hunting industry.

This ethical position has been taken before so this is not unprecedented. Some years ago, the Lion and Safari Park tried to abandon cub petting only to find that they lost so much tourist traffic that they were obliged to reinstate cub petting.

So the public should not underestimate the cost of making such a morally courageous decision. The rhino and lion reserve will lose some tourist traffic as a result of taking this principled stand and we can only hope that they do not lose so much that they are obliged to reverse it.

The new manager at Rhino and Lion Park is Mike Fynn, who is no doubt primarily responsible for this courageous decision.
Especially since he was the manager at Lion and Safari Park and very much responsible for that facility attempting to take the same principled stand.

For good measure, Mike was an active member of the captive carnivore working group, a broad cross-section of all sectors interested in lion conservation, which was seeking to fill the gap in government regulation by drafting suitable regulations which government could adopt and enforce in order to improve the conditions of lions at lion farms in South Africa.

An unsung hero indeed, quietly working away to improve the lives of lions. 

https://www.sapeople.com/2019/09/09/rhino-and-lion-reserve-in-south-africa-will-no-longer-offer-cup-petting/?fbclid=IwAR0u6B689RdUhi-bild-yH8EkK7Abj9WhU0yIvaP97T7yBdNqzbLIVqUjs4

I was reading the response by the Minister for the Environment in South Africa to parliamentary questions on the status of lions, when, to my horror, I came across this old canard which ought to have been discarded years ago. 

I quote:
2) A non-detrimental finding (NDF) made by a Scientific Authority, in respect of African lion and in terms of section 61(1)(d) of the National Environmental Management Biodiversity Act, 2004 indicates that there are currently no major threats to the wild and managed lion populations of South Africa, whereas minor threats include over-utilisation, disease, poaching and conflict with communities around protected areas. The NDF further states that trophy hunting of captive-bred lions poses no threat to the wild population within South Africa, and “it is thought that captive lions may in fact serve as a buffer to potential threats to wild lions by being the primary source for hunting trophies and derived products (such as bone)”. The NDF was published in the Gazette, No. 41393, on 23 January 2018.

The “scientific authority” referred to is the very same one which was thoroughly discredited during the recent parliamentary colloquium when it was quite apparent that it had no idea at all what it was talking about, consisted for the most part of a bunch of ivory tower academics who had as much understanding of the blood and guts of the hunting industry is that of a dog watching a passing aircraft, and was prepared to stand behind an assumption made by another academic from Oxford University. A personal assumption for which there was not a shred of evidence.

It is hunting propaganda repeated by academics as if it were a scientific truth. Yet the moment it is subjected to scrutiny it collapses like a pricked balloon. But pricked balloons have an amazing unscientific ability to re-inflate themselves and be promoted as scientific truths by the Department of Environment.

Some academic at Oxford made a personal assumption and mentioned in passing, with no scientific evidence at all, that:
“it is thought that captive lions may in fact serve as a buffer to potential threats to wild lions by being the primary source for hunting trophies and derived products (such as bone)”. 

And now here is this personal assumption being put forward by the Minister as if it were an established scientific fact.. Disgraceful!

In reading the quote of the Minister’s reply you might have missed the critical three words - within South Africa.

So, even if lion farming in South Africa is stimulating the poaching of wild lions in neighboring territories to the extent of causing regional extinction, the Department of Environment and what passes muster for nature conservation in the provinces continue to eagerly promote lion farming and canned lion hunting.  
Yet the threat posed by SA lion farms to lions in Southern Africa is not mere assumption. Read for example what is happening in Mozambique:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/lions-menu-now-inside-legal-lion-bone-trade/story?id=64827468

So, all conservationists know of CITES Decision 14.69 which bans the breeding of tigers for the trade in their body parts. Why? Because everyone in the conservation universe understood that permitting Tiger farming for the trade in body parts would not only stimulate the poaching of wild tigers it would make it impossible for customs officials and other authorities to be able to determine whether the bones they were looking at were legal ones or from a poached wild animal. The bones all look the same.

Now, if Tiger farming is banned because the trade in body parts is going to adversely impact wild tigers, why is the farming of lions not banned for exactly the same reason? But no in the case of lions, lion farming should be legal and promoted by government, because some foreign academic mentions that tame lions might provide a buffer to protect wild lions from hunters.
And what does this baseless assumption say about the hunting industry?
That trophy hunters are so rabidly determined to kill lions that if they can’t find a tame one they’ll move heaven and earth to kill a wild one?

So pity the poor lions. South African conservation officials who are paid by the taxpayer to protect our wildlife instead use public money to subsidise the hunting industry.
​And they are so inept that they cannot tell the difference between assumption and scientific fact.
 

Lion bone trade: justice delayed is justice denied
Hot off the press, the decision of the High Court in the matter of the National Council of the SPCA against the lion farmers and their stooges in government, is causing quite a stir.
The NSPCA challenged the legality of the way the SA government determined the export quotas for lion bones. In particular, it challenged the minister’s conservation dogma that animal welfare had nothing to do with the Department of Environment.
You can read the full judgement of the High Court here:
https://emsfoundation.org.za/wp-content/uploads/Judgment-Lion-Bone-case-6-August-2019.pdf
So as you can see, the High Court decision was essentially moot; it related to the 800- carcass quota for 2017 and the 1500- carcass quota for 2018, both of which quotas had already been exported. Clearly though, the decision that the quotas were determined illegally and without taking all relevant factors into account will have a salutary effect upon future quota settings.
Much of the judgement relates to the importance of the government taking animal welfare considerations into account in all aspects of conservation but specifically here in the setting of export quotas. Many lions are kept in appalling conditions in South Africa. The lion bone trade wants bones so a skeletal lion is much more profitable than a healthy animal who needs to be fed better to remain healthy.
Had I been arguing the case, I would have pointed out that it is quite impossible to effectively manage the lion population or indeed any wildlife population without including animal welfare considerations within the current conservation paradigm of sustainable use.
(Sustainable use is the theory; sustained abuse is the practice)
The reason is this: I have personally been told by any number of conservation officials: “don’t bother us with animal welfare. Animal welfare is no part of our mandate. We are only concerned with population numbers.”
So as far as they’re concerned, they just count the numbers. If the numbers of animals go up they pat themselves on the back and say what a wonderful job they’re doing. If the numbers go down, then they pretend that they have to do something about it.
The inevitable result of this narrow numbers based approach to sustainable use is that the condition of the animals composing the wildlife populations becomes irrelevant. This is so wrong.
It is highly relevant to conservation and to sustainable use that three quarters of the species are now in miserable captive conditions being starved to death for the lion bone market where as conservationists are treating them as if they were part of the ecology/environment.

​So what happens now?
My guess is that this judgement will be honoured more in the breach than in the observance by South African government conservation structures. They will continue to support lion farming and the export of lion bones and rely on the fact that anyone challenging their thumb- suck quotas will have to take them to the High Court, a remedy which is obscenely expensive, coin- tossingly uncertain and slower than cancer.
 
 

                                    
​                With the heart of a lioness
       One volunteer’s journey of discovery in the dark heart of the canned lion hunting industry.

The three day animal advocacy course which I offer at the Karoo wildlife centre has the advantage of bringing me into contact with volunteers who know much more about cup petting then I do.

One of the attendees of my recent course was a lady who I shall call Ronnie and she is the author of the book titled “With the Heart of a Lioness.)

 She was kind enough to give me a one-minute video clip about her book. https://youtu.be/a7sV8MJRML4

I am frequently approached by volunteers to South Africa wanting advice on ethical destinations. I always say that the rule of thumb is: avoid any facility where breeding takes place.

Unfortunately, there seems to be an insatiable demand - in particular among the tender gender - to cuddle a lion cub.

Ronnie’s book is a scrupulously careful and detailed account of her experiences at a lion farm in the Free State province of South Africa. On one level it is a guidebook for volunteers; where to go, what to do, how to behave around animals, particularly lions, and everything else that a serious volunteer would need to know.

But on a deeper level the book relates a journey of discovery; how one dedicated animal lover who believed that she was doing conservation work eventually opened her eyes to the ugly reality of lion farming and canned hunting in South Africa.

Little by little she describes how she comes to understand that she has been duped. Here are some of the grandiose claims and fine sounding sentiments which one sordid and squalid lion farm puts out to volunteers to entice them to bring their money and come:
“all cubs are hand raised which boost their survival rate and creates a manageable and sustainable program.
We conserve the Bengal tiger and increase awareness about tiger conservation.
Our mission is to sustain the genetic pool of the lion”…. 

With such skilful and astute deception, lion farms continue to attract gullible animal lovers from overseas. Too late they discover that the extortionate fees that they are charged, which they thought were promoting conservation, in fact enable lion farmers to externalise the cost of rearing their lions to huntable size. And in the process, put local previously disadvantaged South Africans out of work.

The author relates a litany of abuse at every stage of the doomed lions’ lives; reckless breeding, appallingly cruel and amateurish animal husbandry, neglect , cruel exploitation - and all under the cloak of ‘conservation.’

Everything about this sick industry is fraudulent. Volunteers are fraudulently deceived into thinking that they are promoting lion conservation; canned lion hunting is fraudulently claimed to be ‘saving wild lions’; the lion bones that are sold to Asia are fraudulently represented as tiger bones in order to produce tiger bone wine and cake which is then fraudulently passed off to the consumer as a health medicine.

All in all lion farming is a business model built upon routine cruelty to animals which flourishes behind a Bell-Pottinger facade of conservation.

To animal lovers who are thinking of volunteering at any facility in South Africa where breeding takes place and there are cubs to pet, I urge them to read Ronnie’s book first, and then take the time to come to the Karoo wildlife centre for three nights in order to be educated on how the hunting industry has invaded and occupied conservation space in South Africa.
            www.cannedlion.org/volunteers.html
 
 
 

                                               Logic and irrelevance.

A critique of the recently published article titled “The Ethics of human -animal relationships and public discourse: a case study of lions bred for their bones.”

• All cats have four legs
• my dog has four legs
• therefore my dog is a cat.

This is a syllogism which I frequently use in argument to expose the logical flaws in the hunting narrative which runs something like this:

• all conservationists wish to preserve wilderness
• hunters wish to preserve some aspects of wilderness so that they can hunt and kill
• therefore hunters are conservationists.

As you can see hunters’ claims to be conservationists are not even logical let alone factual.

Recently a herd of academics associated with Oxford University put out an article on the use of logic methodology, using the lion bone trade as a case study. They take a few of the arguments used to justify captive lion breeding for the lion bone trade as well as some opposing arguments and point to the lack of logic on both sides in seeking to make definite claims where only uncertainty exists.

I was looking forward to read the article because I offer a three- day course at the Karoo Wildlife Centre on animal advocacy with particular reference to lion farming, canned lion hunting and the lion bone trade. I hoped that I might get some useful course material.

I was disappointed.  Twenty-one pages of dense text was enough to give me a headache - and leave me no wiser than before.

I don’t know who this article was aimed at, unless it is a mere academic exercise. I can’t think of anyone in South African conservation who would derive any benefit from reading it.

Calling it a case study with reference to the lion bone trade is a misnomer because the few references to the lion bone trade were superficial - nothing new there - and completely overshadowed by the mentally suffocating mass of academic verbiage.

That would have been bad enough but the article has clearly suffered from a heavy edit to remove or restate anything which could cause the slightest offence to any person living on our planet or within our galaxy.

The result is political correctness run wild leaving a piece which is so bland as to be virtually non-existent.

If you want to learn about logic to improve your ability to see through false claims being made in politics or conservation, then read a book on how to identify flawed logic. I recommend a little book by Professor Thouless titled  ‘Straight and Crooked Thinking’ which is probably out of print, but there are others.

This article will not help you at all. And if you were hoping for some wisdom on the lion bone trade then all you will get is the realisation of how far away from the blood and guts and dust and flies of real conservation is the academic world.
​
Don’t waste your time reading this article.
 
 

I refer to a report in the latest newsletter from that excellent conservation source Conservation Action Trust:

https://conservationaction.co.za/media-articles/parliament-slams-kruger-park-for-defying-directive-not-to-sign-agreement-with-neighbours/


​So here we have Kruger National Park conservation officials promoting and facilitating the hunting of Kruger Park animals in the adjacent privately owned conservancies, the association of private nature reserves. (APNR)

The hunting quotas approved by these ‘custodians of our wildlife’ are truly shocking; more than 7000 wild animals including 47 elephants.

And this after Kruger Park officials were expressly forbidden to sign off on this agreement by the Chairman of the Portfolio Committee for Environment Affairs of the South African Parliament, Philemon Mapulane MP.

Giving the finger to Parliament in this manner will surely cause outrage in Parliament.

The response of the defiant conservation bureaucrats has been to lie through their teeth, claiming:

1. they did not know they were doing anything wrong; alternatively
2. if they did, they don’t know what all the fuss is about.

This all follows on from the Colloquium held in Parliament in August last year. I declined to attend that colloquium and published a blog explaining why in which I wrote the following:

Add to all this the fact that the portfolio committee would be unable to change anything even if it wanted to. Conservation structures in South Africa have been utterly and completely captured by the hunting industry and any attempt to crack down on lion farming and canned hunting would be met with a torrent of lobbying and litigation:-
‘You gave us permits to breed lions for hunting and for lion bones’, they would argue, ‘so if you want to close us down we want compensation.’
So in short I regard this workshop is a total waste of time.

Nothing demonstrates the power of the hunters’ stranglehold on conservation better than this - defiantly going ahead and signing off on hunting quotas for over 7000 wild animals in direct contravention of a specific instruction by Parliament not to do it.

I have long been complaining that conservation in South Africa is nothing more or less than an arm of the hunting industry.

20 years ago when I first started campaigning against the hunting industry I felt like a lone voice crying in the wilderness, although I remember Ian Michler was also making a noise about it at the time. But our arguments that captive lion breeding had no conservation value, would sabotage our tourism industry, would lead to an increase in the poaching of wild lions, would stimulate wildlife trafficking and carry huge veterinary risks; were unfashionable.

Now, only 20 years later, a mere scantling of time in the SA government dimension, our arguments have been adopted wholesale by mainstream conservation right up to the 12,000 scientists of the IUCN.

Yet despite the public outrage, the pressure from IUCN, the directions from Parliament and the divisions caused within the hunting fraternity itself, hunting continues to be blindly promoted by what passes muster for conservation in South Africa.

This is why I have started to offer a three day course at my Karoo Wildlife Centre, for animal activists who need and want to be informed on how to tackle the hunting industry effectively. We march with placards; the hunters laugh at us. We expose the horrors of hunting on social media and the lame stream media; the hunters laugh at us. We drag a reluctant IUCN into the fray to support our condemnation; the hunters laugh at us. And now we drag the hunting industry before Parliament; the hunters laugh at us.

I believe that my course, if it is supported by an adequate number of dedicated animal lovers, is the best way to break the stranglehold on conservation enjoyed by the hunting fraternity.
 
 
 
 
 

Untrained animal advocates/animal rightists are a danger to the animals they wish to protect and a menace to conservation.

There! There is a statement to cause an explosion on social media. But it’s true.


Imagine that you are on trial for your life. You don’t have any money to hire a trained lawyer. But along comes a well-meaning friend and offers to represent you at your trial. You, naturally, want to know if he is qualified. Nope. No qualifications.
You naturally want to know if he has any experience as a trial lawyer. Nope. No experience.
“Well,” you ask:  “how can you possibly help me? Having the best of intentions is meaningless. I need a top-class trial lawyer.”

Substitute animals for yourself, and untrained animal rightists for the well-meaning friend and that is exactly why our wildlife is in such trouble.

The people who wish to protect them haven’t a clue how to go about it effectively. And make no mistake the animals are on trial for their lives. The hunters are the prosecutors and indeed the judges. And to represent them, the animals have …. only you.

So how do you become an effective animal advocate. Well, you have to qualify yourself in that particular area of conservation. In our case that is the plight of the lions caught up in the awful lion farming and canned hunting industry.

You need to be able to mobilise effectively against an entire industry backed up by the best public relations brains in the world. You need to motivate animal lovers to join in the struggle and to become effective advocates themselves. You need to be able to debate the issues intelligently on television or radio and to be able to counter the pro-hunting arguments.

In short you have to become a thought influencer.

How do you do that? Answer: with a great deal of time and effort and commitment.

First, read as much as you can on websites such as ours to educate yourself on the issues so that you can make an intelligent contribution to any debate. Gather useful statistics that you can throw at opponents. Learn the arguments and the counter-arguments. Regulators are obliged by law to publish new regulations for public participation. This is your opportunity to give input. So do your homework and submit input that would be useful and persuasive to a regulator.

Now I’ll spell out some specific actions you should take, illustrated with case studies and examples.

                             ************************
​
That is an excerpt from one of the five lectures that make up the course on advocacy. Details here:
 www.cannedlion.org/volunteers.html

​One point of interest to me: all the people who have applied to attend the monthly 3-day courses are from outside SA. What does that say about South African animal lovers?

Oh dear! Oh dear!
How hope springs eternal....

So much hype developing around the forthcoming CITES conference.
The same hype I saw and warned against when the SA Portfolio Committee of Parliament held the Colloquium on lion farming last year. 
And as I predicted, that initiative is now mired in bureaucracy in the form of a 'high level panel' (!!)

​Better read this before you get too excited. Sorry to rain on other peoples' parade yet again...
​
CITES and Sustainable Use

Imagine that you are sitting in a plenary session of CITES in Kuala Lumpur or some other exotic conference venue for international talk shops. You are one of 5000 people in a vast hall, each with your own special interest and agenda. Next to you is sitting a Japanese piano maker.  He has no interest whatever in the conservation of lions. He is merely there to ensure that he can continue to get his hardwood supplies from Indonesia. It is quite impossible for you to speak or be heard. There are just too many people and to many different and often conflicting agendas.

Now you can see why CITES was doomed to fail from the start. CITES is not a conservation body. It is a trade organisation. How on earth did we come to a situation where a trade organisation dictates policy to conservationists around the world? How bizarre!

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-01-17-cites-the-trade-system-that-doesnt-know-that-it-doesnt-know/

So flick through the links below just to see for yourselves what a useless, toothless piece of international bureaucracy CITES is, and why you should not waste your time trying to get this species or that moved from this Appendix to that.

In the real world of wildlife trafficking, CITES is a joke.

Other than CITES, which we can discount, the hunting industry is further protected by the international conservation policy known as sustainable use. This has been adopted by most countries as part of the Convention on Biodiversity.

For the hunting industry the doctrine of ‘wise use’(!) Is an international licence to kill. For the wildlife it is a disaster and you should be campaigning for a brand new conservation paradigm.

http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/cites-and-other-dangerous-illusions
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/a-cry-for-preservation-of-wilderness
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/a-deplorables-view-of-mal-investment-in-conservation
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/pouring-cold-water-on-sustainable-use
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/cites-the-apologists-fight-back
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/several-good-reasons-to-abolish-cites
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/lions-and-treaties
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/cites-a-model-of-bureaucratic-waste
 

​Letter to SA banking institutions
Att: Dept of Corporate Social Responsibility
Re: canned lion hunting
 
We draw your attention to the recent policy decision by Nedbank to withdraw funding from captive lion breeders in SA.  http://m.traveller24.news24.com/Traveller/Explore/Green/major-sa-bank-refuses-to-fund-any-canned-hunting-programmes-20161027
The decision to cut off funding to an industry whose sole purpose is to produce living targets for a depraved hunting fraternity follows a growing trend. Our national Department of Tourism no longer promotes cub petting (a profitable spin off) and major tourism associations in EU like ABTA, publish guidelines for their members to discourage visits for cub petting, and volunteers from paying to pet lion cubs at lion farms posing as ‘wildlife sanctuaries.’
Australia, France and Netherlands have already banned the import of lion trophies, and most major airlines now refuse to transport hunting weapons and wildlife trophies. If you provide funding to lion farms, you should be aware that:

• They have no conservation value
• They impact adversely upon the survival of already reduced wild lion populations all over Africa
• They feed the fraudulent lion bone trade to Asia
• Their whole business model is built upon routine cruelty to lions at all stages of their lives, right from being removed from their mothers unnaturally at birth, to their brutal deaths by bullets or bow and arrow.

Because of the existential threat to wild lion populations throughout Africa, the IUCN recently passed a ground-breaking Motion 009 calling for lion farming and canned hunting to be banned. The considered advice by this pre-eminent global conservation authority, 1,300 organisations and 16,000 conservation scientists, have been treated with contempt by Minister Edna Molewa and her DEA. She gave no reason for doing so, but we know the real reason: regulatory capture.
State capture is all the news currently, but in truth, regulatory capture by powerful industries like hunting has been the norm for decades. Conservation has not been spared. Hunters control conservation structures in SA as completely as if they owned them.
If government is thus paralysed, and the 8000 captive lions in SA are doomed to a life worse than death, then it is up to corporate South Africa and a public that loves wildlife, to take a principled stand.
We urge you to emulate Nedbank’s ethics and  to withdraw funding from lion breeders and all the accessories, the hunting operators, the taxidermists who prefer to live off bloodshed than to find honest employment.
We leave you with some of the views expressed by Australian MPs in the Parliamentary debate which preceded to ban on import of lion trophies.
Sincerely
Chris Mercer
Director, Campaign Against Canned Hunting.
MEMORABLE QUOTES FROM THE DEBATE ON CANNED LION HUNTING IN THE AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENT.
Jason Wood MP:
I spoke in this place in May last year about the appalling practice of canned hunting and today I rise with the knowledge that my words back then are resonating increasingly in our community, in our parliament and around the world. People see this practice, as I do, as cruel and barbaric.
Many believe that hunting of endangered species has economic and conservation benefits for countries involved. This is simply false. A report written by Melbourne economist Roderick Campbell from Economists at Large showed that revenue from trophy hunting represented only two per cent of tourism in Africa and that this tourism revenue is only a small fraction, considering that it is $200 million whereas the economy is $408 billion. Sadly, there are only 7,000 to 8,000 lions left in captivity, 160 of these in privately owned canned hunting reserves.
 
Mr Entsch MP:
It is not often we quote a thrash metal band in this chamber, but Megadeth's song, Countdown to Extinction, highlights the practice perfectly:
Endangered species, caged in fright
Shot in cold blood, no chance to fight
The stage is set, now pay the price.
An ego boost, don't think twice
Technology, the battle's unfair
You pull the hammer without a care
Squeeze the trigger that makes you 'Man'
Pseudo-safari, the hunt is canned
 
Ms Parke MP:
I believe that canned hunting is another example of animal cruelty in which Australia is currently complicit by allowing the importation of hunting trophies. By not acting to prevent the importation of hunting trophies, we are effectively supporting an activity which is both cruel and unethical, a form of barbarism that has a direct impact on endangered species we have committed to protect.
 
Mrs Prentice MP:
Frankly, I call this sport un-Australian. Australians pride themselves on living by the creed of a fair go. Where is the fair go for these animals?
 
Ms Hall MP
Trophy hunters are attracted to a situation where the animal is in an enclosed space and has some level of trust of human beings. I am not a person who supports hunting, but, to my way of thinking, this is quite a brutal and inhumane--
Interjection by an honourable member: Cowardly.
Ms HALL:  - and cowardly attack on defenceless animals.
 
Mr Kelvin Thomson MP;
It is barbaric killing for macabre trophies.  The idea of killing animals for sport is frankly barbaric and medieval but, if people really want to do it, then at least we should have a level playing field. The lions have teeth and claws; so give the hunter an appropriately sized knife and fire up the lions a bit before the contest by not feeding them for a couple of days. That would be fairer.