​                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.

Cape Town artist Hilda Beukes donated a big oil painting (1,3m high by 90 cm wide) of a lion to raise funds for the Campaign Against Canned lion Hunting (CACH). The painting was put up on the wall of the new Post House restaurant on the R62 in Ladismith, W. Cape. 
​
The coffee shop is popular with tourists and we expected the painting to sell to a Rand rich tourist. Somewhat to our surprise, it was bought by a local Ladismith resident who fell in love with it.
In a flyer that Hilda gave us along with the painting, she relates the story of how the painting came about.

Hilda Beukes writes:
My husband took me to a 'conservancy' in the Free State for my birthday so that I could take photos.

I went out that morning very early on my own just when the sun came up and I was trying to get the attention of two cheetahs in one camp when I caught a slight movement to my right. He was stalking me through the trees. Very eerie feeling…. When he saw that I’ve seen him he casually strolled right up next to me by the fence so close I could touch him and he got up on an old tree stump and just started posing the whole time making eye contact.

I didn’t even want to take photos, we just talked with each other for almost 2 hours then I suppose he got bored. He wasn’t aggressive or threatened by me at all. It was an amazing experience and we really shared a moment.

The encounter just touched my heart and it was something I just couldn’t walk away from ever since.

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.
 

Visit to Inverdoorn private game reserve by Chris Mercer  (CACH) and Toni Brockhoven (BWC).

On the 4th and 5th September, we visited the resort at the request of the new owner, Searl Derman, in order to assess the existing Cheetah program and to advise on any changes needed to comply with fair trade tourism guidelines.

Inverdoorn is a big five upmarket resort in the Tankwa Karoo near Sutherland. The lodge sits on a vast expanse of flat Karoo veld, 10,000 ha in all. The attempted poaching of one of their rhino some years ago featured in Richard Peirce’s book Poachers Moon.

About ten minutes drive away from the town of Touws Rivier lies Aquila private game reserve which is a successful ecotourism resort built up by Searl from scratch over the last 21 years. Aquila is the busiest private game reserve in Africa. A large number of tourists visit every year and it provides employment for around 500 staff.

Searl has bought Inverdoorn for a number of reasons. It is not far away from his main business (Aquila) and it fits with a business plan to offer a more remote and more exclusive five-star resort as part of a package tour.

The ethics committee
However he was concerned that the existing cheetah program might be seen as unethical and could damage his reputation so he contacted me and I suggested that he set up a completely independent ethics committee to advise him and to deal with any complaints about ethics, leaving him free to focus on business, while knowing that the welfare of the animals is not being compromised.

Toni Brockhoven of Beauty Without Cruelty in Cape Town, and wildlife documentary author and activist Richard Peirce have kindly agreed to join me to form the committee.

The cheetah program
We had a good look at the existing cheetah program. There are 15 animals in captivity. They are cared for by an experienced and dedicated handler. There is an excellent quality of life enhancement program which ensures that they remain in good condition. There are no volunteers; all the Cheetah staff are full time employees.

Every evening at 5 o’clock, as part of their exercise regimen and for rehabilitation purposes , a number of cheetah have to run for their supper, chasing a lure down a runway at up to 120 km an hour. At the end of the run they are rewarded with their food. There is no interaction with tourists who merely observe from a vantage point on top of a building halfway along the run. This ritual happens every evening regardless of whether there are tourists there to observe.

The holding camps are spacious and clean. On a daily basis in the mornings, cheetah are taken out into the veld in the reserve where they are allowed to run free and do whatever they want, chase after prey or lie under trees, depending on their mood. There are no ethical reasons why tourists should not accompany the habituated cheetah on these walks through the bush.
The same thing happens at Samara game reserve near Graaf Reinet where the famous cheetah Sybella was quite happy to allow tourists to sit a little distance away from her and to accompany her at some distance while she went about her daily tasks as a wild self-sustaining animal.

What worried Searl was that some tourists have been allowed in the past to touch the cheetah on these occasions, although under very strict control by the handler,  who would only allow touching when the animals were relaxed and purring and not at all if she felt that the animal was not in the mood.

Unfortunately, the very word ‘touching’ conjures up unacceptable images of lion cubs being passed around clumsy tourists in order to externalise the cost of rearing them to canned huntable size.

However the modern view - and the ethics of animal welfare are still evolving - is that any form of touching should not be allowed and we advised the staff.  Searl had already stopped any touching. Toni of Beauty Without Cruelty confirms that no physical interaction from the public must take place, regardless.  Inverdoon has already alerted the previously- booked patrons that no direct animal interaction will take place as previously advertised, but that tourists will enjoy an educational cheetah tour which includes watching them run. Visitors are also taken in a safari vehicle to see the cheetah being prepared for their life back in the wild.

Speaking personally my concern is less for animal ethics as a dogma and far more on whether the animals are content and well cared for.
And I must say that the Inverdoorn cheetah are probably the luckiest captive cheetah in South Africa in terms of condition, care, contentment, and quality of life enhancement programs. These animals will never be hunted.
​
Searl has already decided that he will predator- fence up to 5000 hectares into which he will import a suitable prey base such as springbok, blesbok and ostrich. Then a family of his captive Cheetah will be released to live wild and free.