A roar in the winelands

I heard about Paul Hart’s Drakenstein Lion Park from a friend and I wondered whether he was dreaming. A lion park in the heart of the Cape winelands? But true enough, when I phoned the number, a voice answered: ‘The Drakenstein Lion Park, can I help you?”

I have not seen many lions in my time, so I was intrigued to see how lions adapted to being in the Boland. Centuries ago Cape lions roamed the area, but they are extinct – except for one found in a zoo in Russia which was returned to the Tygerberg Zoo. It’s supposed to be the very last Cape lion on Earth.

When I arrived at Drakenstein, it took me a while to spot the big-maned male and two females lying in perfect repose under a tree. The male gazed at me with sleepy yellow eyes. He offered a lazy whisk of his tail and blinked slowly once before returning to motionless splendour.

‘Is that it for the day?” I asked Hart.

‘Well, for now,” he grinned. ‘It’s not like those lion programmes you see on TV, where they’re always chasing prey. They sleep or rest for about 20 hours a day and are active for four hours. That’s the time they would usually hunt, if they were in the wild.”

He chuckled: ‘They’re a little more animated at feeding time.”

‘I bet,” I said, enjoying his understatement.

Hart told me that when the three lions arrived at Drakenstein they were far from relaxed. Moving them from the small cage they had been kept in to this wide open space was extremely traumatic for the lions. They cowered under bushes for weeks before they began to adjust.

Drakenstein was established as a sanctuary for captive-born lions six years ago by Hart and a partner who finances the project. In the past 18 months the park has doubled in size. Tourists are welcome, but they are not the main focus. There are toilets and a reception area for visitors, but the park is devoted to the welfare of the lions.

Hart told me very little is spent on marketing and advertising. He prefers to spend the money on rescuing lions. He buys lions kept in captivity, from zoos or breeders, and he has to pay a hefty price. Even so, the breeders insist on him signing confidentiality contracts because of the stigma attached to their business.

Most lion breeders in South Africa remove the cubs from their mothers after four days or so. This induces another oestrus cycle in the female lion who, with luck, will quickly mate again. In this way, a highly lucrative assembly line of lion pups is created; pups that almost inevitably end up being shot.

To facilitate the ‘hunt” and minimise risk to the ‘hunter”, the cubs are hand-reared and end up regarding humans as a friendly source of food. This lion-breeding business is the backbone of South Africa’s sordid ‘canned” hunting industry.

The trophy hunter pays according to a lion’s physical attributes. The words sound wrong somehow, but the more ‘aesthetically pleasing” the lion, the more the trophy hunter is prepared to fork out.

A male lion reaches his peak when he’s about four to five years old. The more discerning trophy hunter wants a flawless coat, with a well-developed mane. A black mane is especially sought after.

An ‘ordinary” lion will fetch anything from R40 000 upwards, while a black-maned lion could fetch as much as R200 000. Value-added tax on the latter price alone would be in the region of R28 000. That’s not counting the permit fees, tax and so on; all of which goes into government coffers.

Would this, I asked myself, account for a certain sluggishness on the part of the government to act effectively to curb, if not ban canned hunting outright?

When I started asking questions about the industry, I discovered that there are some 2 500 lions that have been bred on game farms waiting to be slaughtered. Let’s be conservative and say each one fetches an average price of R100 000 – that’s a potentional revenue for the lion breeders of R2,5-million. No wonder, as Hart puts it, when you go to the breeding farms, you see spanking new 4x4s. Make no mistake, the killing of lions is big business.

I asked Hart how he prevents breeding among the lions at Drakenstein, in order to avoid fuelling the industry in any way. He has used contraceptives, pills, spaying and even castration.

‘A vet thought castrating the male would be a good idea, but it was a disaster. The lion became a wimp. He lost his mane and all control over the females. Now they even eat before him.”

Hart pointed over to a distant camp, but I was unable to spot the poor lion he was referring to. He saw me scrutinising the lazy male lion lying in the camp closer to us.

‘That is supposed to be the king of the jungle, right? So how is it possible that people want to shoot him?” he asked. His tone was at once helpless and angry, underscored by frustration and incomprehension.

‘Do you know,” he continued, ‘that people come here wanting to pay me to shoot these lions?”

‘You mean shoot them in this camp here, from 20m away?” I asked, incredulous. He nodded.

Earlier he’d told me he goes into the lions’ camps quite often. I asked him if he wore a gun for protection. He nodded, but explained: ‘It’s for people wanting to rob me of cash, not for the lions. If I had to shoot any one of the lions to protect myself, I’d have to ask myself what was I doing in their camp in the first place.

‘Anyway, by the time I managed to draw my pistol and cock it, I’d be dead.”

Hart believes the lions he rescues have to live an improved life at Drakenstein. ‘They die here of old age and are never sold.”

Does he sell their skins when they die?

Hart shook his head. ‘People come here wanting to buy the skins, sangomas want to buy the teeth and so on. My answer is no, always no. I personally bury the lions here.

If I sold their skins, I would be aiding the whole damned industry.”

Later I began to understand Paul Hart’s passionate opposition to canned hunting, when I discovered the details of The Cook Report documentary on the Born Free Foundation’s website. The documentary shocked the world when it was screened in the late 1990s.

The scene that people found most chilling was a scene where a lioness paced up and down a fence in a state of agitation. The reason soon became clear: she had been separated from her three cubs a few hours earlier.

Next the film showed the arrival of a professional hunter with a German tourist, his client. A bullet slammed into the side of the lioness. Her body twisted in the air alongside the fence.

The lioness had made no attempt to flee – why should she have? Her cubs were on the other side of the fence, she would not leave them. And why should she fear humans? She had been fed by them until two days earlier.

The documentary shows hunters being given advice on how to lame a lion by wounding it in the shoulder so no harm is done to the head, thereby blemishing the trophy. The crew was even offered Bengal tigers and jaguars to shoot, though these cats are not indigenous to South Africa.

I contacted an official at Western Cape Nature Conservation to discuss a new draft national policy on breeding and hunting predators, which is intended to tackle the more horrifying aspects of the canned hunting industry.

I started feeling optimistic that things might improve, but when I asked Hart his opinion he was anything but optimistic.

‘They want to legislate that lions must be left alone for six months after being in captivity so that they can be reclassified as wild,” he said. ‘That is nonsense. A lion will never be wild after being in captivity and fed by humans. It’s simple: it won’t run away when a hunter approaches, so it’s still canned hunting.

‘The public has hardly had an opportunity to study this policy. And I can tell you the big problem is enforcement. How do you think officials from the department will ever get to monitor these massive breeding farms?

‘A breeder can do as he likes, breed lions as much as he wants in a little corner that will never be discovered by conservationists. And if he’s ever caught, all he has to say is, ‘Gee, I haven’t touched that lion for six months —’ Who’s going to prove it’s not so?”

Just before I left, Hart climbed over various fences and gates separating us from the lions. I held my breath. Was he serious? The lions were watching him, but they didn’t move.

He straightened up and called out: ‘Kovu!”

The lions continued to watch.

Again he called out: ‘Kovu!”

This time a young lion stirred. I won’t swear to this, but it seemed to me that the big lion actually smiled. The next moment he came bounding along towards Hart, with that gait peculiar to lions.

When he reached the man, he reared up and actually hugged him, in a lion sort of way, resting his giant paws on Hart’s shoulders and nestling his massive head in the crook of Hart’s neck.

Kovu weighs about 150kg and stands about 2,4m high. You could say this was the mother of all hugs!

Hart uttered some guttural sounds and Kovu responded with similar, soft growls. Kovu’s head lolled and he blinked slowly, lovingly, while Hart stroked his mane.

‘They regard me as part of their pride,” Hart explained when he returned to my side of the fence.

I felt as if I had just witnessed a miracle of nature. Like so many other people, I did not know this special kind of relationship existed – until I visited Drakenstein. Paul Hart knows about it, and so do the lions, of course. And maybe, I thought later, they understand things we don’t.