A once infamous canned-lion breeding farm has been revamped to serve as a sanctuary for predators bred in captivity.
Camorhi Game Lodge, at one time a venue of choice for the canned-lion hunting industry, has been renamed Lionsrock and will be the new home of hundreds of lions scheduled to be put down.
The Mail & Guardian has reported extensively on the canned-lion-hunting activities of the notorious lodge near Bethlehem in the Free State. But things have changed. ”Now Lionsrock is a retirement village for lions,” said Fiona Miles, spokesperson for the European animal rescue and welfare organisation, Vier Pfoten (Four Paws), which runs Lionsrock. ”Captive-bred lions, destined for canned-lion hunts, can find a home here.”
Canned-lion hunting is responsible for the killing of about 300 captive-bred lions a year, and the ”industry” is estimated to be worth R2,5-billion. The sector, which breeds wildlife to be shot in fenced-off areas, has grown dramatically in recent years, and animal activists have campaigned vigorously to limit it through legislation, which is due to be introduced in February 2008.
The new hunting legislation will affect an estimated 6 000 lions believed to be on breeding and hunting farms. It is feared that the law will make it unsustainable for the breeders and farm owners to keep the lions on their farms, with the result that they will have to get rid of them by killing them.
The new law will introduce a national registration and permit system for cat breeders and hunters. When the new legislation was announced last year, hunting-farm owners had to prove that an animal had been free-ranging and fully self-sustaining for at least six months before it could be hunted. But in February this year, Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk raised the bar to 24 months. This is expected to reduce the number of lions that are hunted every year, creating the problem of a large lion population that essentially has no economic value for its owners.
The new legislation does not stipulate the size of the land in which a captive-bred animal may be hunted. It simply states that the animal must have a ”reasonable” chance of avoiding the hunter. Animal activists have been critical of this.
Departmental spokesperson Blessing Manale told the M&G earlier this year that the intention of the new regulations had always been to limit breeding activities. He said that with hunting strictly regulated the number of breeding facilities would decline, but no one could predict accurately at that stage by how much.
Lionsrock’s policy allows no breeding, no hunting and no trade in animals. It controls breeding by sterilising male lions, which is, according to Free State state vets, the only known effective method of controlling reproduction in accordance with animal welfare requirements.
”The sterilisation of females causes tension in prides,” said Amir Khalil, the international project manager for Vier Pfoten.
There are five enclosures on the farm, built in the form of a paw. First to move into the new big enclosures is lioness Frida, which has been the subject of a transcontinental tug of war that the M&G reported on at the beginning of the year. The owners of a Romanian radio station rescued her as a tiny cub from appalling conditions at Craiova Zoo in Bucharest and sent her to South Africa. But in South Africa, Frida ended up at the then Camorhi Game Lodge, something Vier Pfoten admitted was a grave mistake.
Khalil said the organisation had been looking for a lion sanctuary in South Africa for some time and, when Frida’s dilemma came to light, it made sense to buy the farm. He said all ties with the former owners had been broken and that most of the former management of Camorhi had resigned.
He said Lionsrock would not buy animals from breeding farms.
It is estimated that Lionsrock will be able to accommodate about 500 lions, far fewer than the number soon likely to need a new home. Khalil said similar facilities would have to be arranged to accommodate the lions that Lions-rock can’t save.