By
Chris Mercer

I’m concerned about the hype that has surrounded the report of the parliamentary committee on the issue of captive lion breeding. The report is the result of a colloquium which took place over two days in Cape Town in August 2018.
​To the delight of animal activists - and the despair of the lion farmers, the report unequivocally calls for the Department of Environment (DEA) to start the process of phasing out lion farming and canned lion hunting. The actual committee resolution reads:
The Department of Environmental Affairs should as a matter of urgency initiate a policy and legislative review of Captive Breeding of Lions for hunting and Lion bone trade with a viewto putting an end to this practice.

There is not the slightest doubt that canned lion hunting is morally repugnant. Educate yourself by watching this short two minute video which will convince most ordinary people that lion trophy hunting is a horror show.  https://youtu.be/GZCUO6s9E0I 

An article in the Independent online by senior reporter Sheree Bega summarises the findings of the Parliamentary committee report, and also the reaction of various stakeholders and activists to that report.
https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/outrage-over-lions-bred-to-be-killed-by-deep-pocketed-trophy-hunters-18159693

What worries me, reading everything that has been published in social media, is that while activists are falling over each other to congratulate themselves on their success, there seems to me to be an unwarranted optimism that the report is going to result in a ban on lion farming and canned hunting. My personal opinion is that this is naive.

Anyone who thinks that a report by a Parliamentary committee is going to result in a ban on canned lion hunting in the foreseeable future does not understand how conservation works in South Africa. You have to understand that conservation structures are so thoroughly captured by the hunting industry that they could almost be regarded as an arm of the hunting industry.

We have the ridiculous situation in South Africa that the struggling taxpayer is actually subsidising the obscenely wealthy business of killing wildlife for profit – by funding a captured regulator.

Once you understand that, you will not be shocked when you read that the request by the 12,000 leading conservation scientists of the world, the IUCN, to the South African government, to implement a ban on lion farming and canned hunting, fell on deaf ears.

So how do we know that the parliamentary committee report will also not fall on deaf ears in the DEA?

Parliament is far more compelling to the DEA than the IUCN.  This report is a big step in the right direction and there will be consequences. So what do I expect to happen? Well nothing for quite some time. The South African government operates in a different time dimension to the rest of the universe; in the corridors of bureaucracy and legislation, years drift by like grains of sand.

However, the least we can expect is a general tightening up on animal welfare conditions within lion farms. That will be useful. But any attempt by the DEA to impose a ban on lion farming and canned hunting will be met with a barrage of court cases.
The hunting fraternity knows very well how to lobby and litigate ferociously. They’ve done so before, successfully, and they’ll do it again. Money to pay for the top-class lawyers who will fight their cause will flow like rivers from obscenely wealthy overseas asylums for rich animal abusers. Appeal after appeal will prolong the process for years if not decades. The South African legal system moves at a glacial pace.

But as the months and years drift by perhaps the next step will be for the committee to bring the report to Parliament for debate in the National Assembly. In that case, if you have tears, prepare to shed them now, because the debate will immediately become racialised and politicised.

South Africa’s torturous history of colonialism and apartheid has resulted in a government which is obsessed with ‘transformation.’ That is the buzzword to legitimise the taking of wealth from white people and redistributing it to people of colour i.e. ‘previously disadvantaged’.
In plain words the debate in the National Assembly will not be about animal welfare or ethics.
It will be about the racial composition of the lion farming industry.

And therein lies a huge weakness which will be seized upon, because this industry is - in the words of former DEA Minister Edna Molewa, ‘substantially un-transformed.’ Ie the people making money out of lion farming and canned hunting are almost entirely white.

Once the debate moves in that direction, then there is a dagger pointing at the heart of lion farming in the form of the new much-publicised government policy to expropriate land owned by white people without compensation and to redistribute it to people of colour. Lion farmers and canned hunting operators have far more to fear from land expropriation without compensation than they do from animal activists. Ironically, it may be the result of animal activism that lion hunting farms find themselves at  the top of the list for expropriation.

What might happen to the lions in captivity if and when lion farms are expropriated does not bear thinking about.

What if I am wrong? What if Parliament eventually (years if not a decade) passes legislation which survives all the legal challenges, to bring lion farming and canned hunting to an end? We would still have to restrain our jubilation because one should never underestimate the resourcefulness of animal abusers. There would be a flurry of midnight flights, the captive Lions in South Africa would disappear like Scotch mist (or government funds in a state owned enterprise,) and the hunting magazines would suddenly be full of advertisements for lion hunts in neighbouring territories where government is weak, such as Mozambique or Zimbabwe.

Please don’t think that I’m saying: what’s the point? let’s all give up. On the contrary, it was our efforts as activists that resulted in this important colloquium and in the 20 years or so that I have been campaigning against lion trophy hunting, I have seen enormous changes for the better in terms of public awareness. Our efforts have raised public ire to the point where the hunting industry has split down the middle, with one half joining the clarion call for a ban. (not from any motive of animal welfare, to be sure, but rather out of fear that public disgust at canned lion hunting will drag down the whole trophy hunting business)

We must redouble our efforts to raise public awareness and to get foreign countries to ban the import of lion trophies.

​Bringing to an end the captive breeding of lions for hunting purposes is a lifetime’s work and there are no quick fixes.  In five years’ time, the reality is that canned lion hunting will still be happening.
So we go on…
 

​                                       Aftermath
         
The Parliamentary Colloquium on lion farming in SA.
by 
​Chris Mercer.

I’ve been re-reading the transcript of the submissions made to the Portfolio Committee of Parliament in Cape Town recently.

Some of the arguments advanced on behalf of the hunting industry made me wonder if they were written by a five-year-old child, whereas in fact they were made by senior officeholders of hunting associations. Tragically, unbelievably, these puerile arguments are accepted as gospel by conservation structures in South Africa. At least, I think they’re childish - you make up your own mind.

Here are some howlers, along with my comments.

1. “It was not the practice of canned lion hunting that is damaging the conservation image of the country, it is the activists who keep publicising it. Government should ban people from commenting negatively on canned hunting. South Africa should only show the good news and kill the bad news.”                                                         

My comment:
Yes, this was a serious submission made to Parliament by an executive member of a hunting association. I did not make this up!
Do I really need to comment? I rest my case on this. Sigh!
   
2.  “The 1000 people who work in the lion sector have a right to earn a living.”     
My comment:
What a sweeping statement! So everyone has a right to make a living in any way he chooses. Like robbing banks?  Surely, this right applies only to occupations that are not harmful. Otherwise on his claim you could argue that everyone involved in human trafficking or drug dealing had a right to earn a living in that way. (Oh by the way, the number of workers is grossly exaggerated – a few hundred at most directly involved in hunting.

3.  The DEA should not pay any attention to foreign NGOs who give input on how African wildlife should be managed. The DEA should only listen to Africans. And the Chinese.  Not to any western colonial national.

My comment:
Does that also mean that the SA government should not listen to any foreign hunting organisations such as Safari Club International?  Oops – a little bit of special pleading here in an effort to play the race card.

4.  Hunting brings in more than 1 billion rands of foreign currency to South Africa every year.

My comment:
Ah! So now the criterion for legitimacy is how much money you make. The argument is that, if the industry makes a lot of money for its members, it should not be banned. On that argument the sale of narcotic drugs should be legalised immediately since drug dealers surely make many times more money than the lion hunting industry. And what about the human trafficking industry? Should we also legalise that as well because it makes a lot of money for its perpetrators?

Surely the question is not how much money an industry makes but whether it is harmful. That is why human trafficking and drug dealing are banned and it is why canned lion hunting and lion farming should be banned too. How much money the industry makes is completely and utterly irrelevant. We are talking conservation here, not finance.

5.  Lions should be hunted because otherwise they would be “an economic burden on South Africa. One lion consumes food to the value of R120,000 per year. That equated to R250 million in economic value that they ate.”

My comment:
Again, I’m not making this crap up. We must kill lions because they eat too much?  Really?  Seriously?  This is taken verbatim from the transcript.

And it is not only the hunting fraternity that is guilty of muddled reasoning and crooked thinking. Here from the hallowed halls of Oxford University comes a wondrous academic who advances the following perverse reason to promote canned lion hunting and the lion bone trade.

6.  According to the precautionary approach, Dr Sas-Rolfes stressed, it should be incumbent upon proponents of a zero quota to provide assurances, backed up by scientific evidence, that it would not lead to expansion of illegal trade and the poaching of wild lions or other wild cat species.

My Comment:
Wow! Let’s unpack this little gem of logic. The cautionary rule is a law in South Africa that requires conservationists to take action against any potential threat even if there is insufficient scientific evidence to quantify or measure it. It is a law which is designed to protect the environment, not the commercial interests of polluters or animal abusers.

The good academic takes this law and applies it to an assumption which he has made that the killing of a tame lion prevents the hunting of wild lion. There is not a shred of scientific evidence to support his assumption; on the contrary, tiger farming for the sale of body parts is banned by CITES because everyone knows that allowing a legal trade in animal parts will inevitably stimulate an illegal trade.

Having made a false assumption, he then stands the precautionary rule on its head and applies it against conservationists who warn of the dangers of allowing the export of lion bones to Asia.
In other words, he is taking a precautionary rule designed to protect the environment and using it to protect the commercial interests of lion farmers and canned lion hunting operators.

So on the basis of such childish arguments as these, the SA government Department of Environment (DEA) not only permits, but vigorously promotes a lion farming industry which:

• Inflicts routine cruelty on helpless animals on an industrial scale;
• Sabotages the efforts of the Department of Tourism to promote SA as a responsible tourism destination;
• Causes controversy, confusion and division in conservation
• Has no conservation benefit; and
• May very likely stimulate the illegal trade in body parts of big cats globally.

Oh! I also found some other interesting snippets in the transcripts:
SANBI (the scientific authority of the South African National Biodiversity Institute) who was consulted by the DEA in regard to the quota for lion bone trade to Asia, indicated that “it was not answerable to the public.” Wow! Even though it operates 100% on public funds? Is that acceptable?

The TOPS (threatened or protected species) regulations were only implemented in some provinces eleven years later after being promulgated. Wow! Again! How could it take these SA provincial conservation structures eleven years to start implementing their own regulations? On such an important matter? How dysfunctional is that?

Conclusion
At the end of the transcript the committee announced that a report on the colloquium would be prepared and handed to the committee for further consideration. That has been delayed – perhaps partly due to the untimely death of Minister Edna Molewa, but is expected to be handed to the Portfolio Committee next week.

Then what? I’d love to be an optimist but I suspect that in five years time lion farming will still be flourishing in SA.