The Lion Farmer
Mandy and I were having dinner in a restaurant one night with some people we knew and others we’d met for the first time.
A woman I’d just been introduced to said to me across the table, “I know you work with lions and I think it’s wrong to keep them in captivity.”
I could have been upset that someone I’d just met felt entitled to make such a sweeping statement, but I’m used to it. “What about cows?”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Do you think it’s wrong to keep cows enclosed on a farm? They’re descended, way back, from wild animals, and were domesticated.”
She raised her nose a little, and took on a look of understanding where I was coming from, mixed with superiority. “I’m a vegetarian and I don’t agree with keeping animals for meat.”
“That’s a very nice leather strap you have on your watch,” I said to her, then lifted the tablecloth and took a peek underneath. “And you have nice leather shoes, as well. I bet you have leather seats in your car. Do you think it’s wrong to farm cows for meat, but right to kill them for their skins?”
“That’s irrelevant,” she said, as people do when they know they’re losing an argument. “Cows are kept for consumption, and even though I don’t like it I can understand it, but lions aren’t kept for consumption, they’re kept to be shot by trophy hunters.”
Certainly, no one is going to shoot any of my lions for sport, but I wanted to keep playing devil’s advocate—at least until the main course arrived. “Okay,” I continued, “if people ate lions would that make it okay to keep them?”
“No.”
“Why not? People farm crocodiles for their meat and their leather. If that’s okay, why couldn’t you farm a lion if you ate the meat and used its skin? That’s consumption. Wouldn’t that make it all right?”
“No.”
“Oh,” I said, leaning back in the chair, “so it’s okay to keep and kill cows and crocodiles for meat and leather, but not lions. Is a cow worth less than a lion?”
She couldn’t answer me. It’s an argument that goes around and around in circles, and one in which people have very set opinions which don’t always hold up to close scrutiny. People always like to categorize things and other people, and this pro cess usually involves a line they won’t cross. Consciously or unconsciously, the woman in the restaurant had drawn a line between meat and leather. She thought it wrong to kill an animal for its meat, but okay to execute it for its skin. Odd. Following on from her logic, people who kept cows were all right, but people like me, who kept lions, were horrible.
When I thought about it, I realized that like everyone else in the world I had my lines when it came to lions.
Like many other people in South Africa and subsequently around the world, I was shocked when our local Carte Blanche television current affairs program showed images of a lioness in a cage being shot during a “canned” hunt. I was working in the Lion Park at the time, developing my close bond with Tau and Napoleon. Canned hunting is a term for shooting an animal which has been bred for the sole purpose of being killed as a trophy, for money. In the case in point, the lioness had been lured closer to the hunter by placing one of her cubs in a neighboring cage.
I cannot understand why someone would pick up a gun and shoot a lion simply because the animal has a big black mane. Nor can I understand why someone would shoot a magnificent kudu bull just because the antelope has a nice pair of long curly horns. I can, however, understand why someone would kill an antelope for its meat. To me, that is the same as killing a cow for steak.
As someone who keeps lions and knows a thing or two about them, I started thinking about lion hunting, in the wild and on farms where the so-called canned hunts take place. This is an emotional issue, especially in Africa, but outside it, as well. I’m not the sort of person who listens to conventional wisdom and takes the views of others as gospel. I never have been and so I decided the best way for me to make an informed judgment about lion hunting, and farms where lions were bred to be shot, was to go and see one of these places for myself.
I contacted the owner of a hunting lodge where they bred lions and he agreed to show me around. I won’t say where in South Africa it was, but it was far enough from my home for me to justify flying myself there in a light aircraft.
I love flying, and I fly the way I interact with my lions. When there is someone else in the aircraft—just like when there are visitors watching me with my lions—I keep it toned down and conservative. I don’t show off for people in front of my lions, or push their limits, and I take the same approach when I’m piloting an airplane. When I’m alone, however, it’s a different story. When I’m flying solo I’m never unsafe and I don’t break the law, but I do enjoy myself. It was good to be airborne again, and the sun streamed into the cockpit as I passed over open plains of golden grass and the neat geometric circles and rectangles of cultivated fields. As my course took me farther into the heart of the country, the farmland gave way to more rugged country, hills and valleys covered in the gray-greens and khakis of the bush. Away from the tarred highways, graded dirt roads ran like red arteries back into the heart of Africa.
I checked the GPS and found the remote airstrip. Banking, I executed a low-level pass over the airstrip to make sure there was no game grazing on the close-cropped grass.
The farmer who had agreed to host me was waiting for me, leaning against the warm side of his dusty Land Cruiser pickup, his eyes shaded by the brim of his bush hat, arms folded. I climbed down from the plane, took off my sunglasses, and walked over. He was a young guy—younger than he’d sounded on the phone—but like most farmers I’ve met, his face and arms and legs were tanned from a life outdoors in the sun. His handshake was firm.
I threw my bag in the back of the Cruiser, and as he drove me to the farm I asked Dirk, as I’ll call him, how long he had been running the hunting farm.
“All my life. I was born to be a leeu boer,” Dirk said, using the Afrikaans term for lion farmer as he navigated along the corrugated road. “My father farmed lions and so did my grandfather. My father bought this farm many years ago. This is the only place I have ever lived.”
“Why lions?” I asked him.
He shrugged and looked at me. “Why not? Like the man down the road on the next property breeds cows, my family breeds lions. We don’t see them like your Tau and Napoleon at the Lion Park. For us the lions are commodities, not pets.”
“Are you a hunter?” Dirk asked me.
“I like fly fishing,” I said.
“Do you eat what you catch, or do you have the fish stuffed and mounted?”
“I mostly catch and release,” I said honestly, “and besides, the big ones taste like crap.” He smiled. “Hunting’s not for me, but I can understand why some people want to do it. A lot of people tell me it’s not right for me to go into the enclosures with my lions or to domesticate them, but that just makes me want to do it even more.”
“I thought that since you love the lions so much you must be one of those bunny-huggers that think they know everything,” Dirk said as we neared the farm buildings.
“I’m not a hunter and I’m not a bunny-hugger,” I assured him. “I’m probably somewhere in the middle.”
“What we do is not illegal, you know? This four-by-four bakkie that we’re driving in was paid for by lion farming and lion hunting. I pay my taxes like every other honest person.”
Dirk stopped near a high electrified fence, got out, and unlocked the gate, which he slid open. I got out and closed it behind the Land Cruiser as he drove through. Once inside the perimeter fence, we walked to the cages and I saw his lions.
At first I was horrified, and then I became angry. In cage after cage there were lions and lions and lions—more than I had ever seen in one place. I can’t remember how many there were—scores or maybe hundreds. They were mostly males, and of varying ages, as this was obviously where the money was for trophies. I saw tiny cubs still squeaking and squawking; youngsters that reminded me of Tau and Napoleon when I’d first met them; and two- and three-year-olds that did nothing to hide their anger and resentment as we walked past them. The biggest males, with dark manes, would be the next to die. The females were breeders, pure and simple, no different than hens on an egg farm. What a life these poor cats must lead, I thought to myself.
We left the cages and drove back to the farmhouse. On the drive I thought about what I’d seen. I am an observer, and I had taken note of the conditions in the cages. The lions were well fed and watered and their cages were kept clean. I suppose the lion farmer kept things clean and orderly for the same reason I do—to keep my lions healthy and prevent the spread of flies. The adult males were in good health, and I imagined that a rich professional hunter from overseas would not want to shoot a mangy lion with his ribs showing, any more than a film or documentary-maker would want to see one of my lions in less than top condition,
As we drove through the gate to Dirk’s home, I realized that if I had been looking at pigs or cows or chickens or goats instead of lions, I wouldn’t have found anything wrong with this farm. These lions were not “free range” but neither were they being mistreated. Once I stopped thinking about how Tau and Napoleon would feel if they were penned in like Dirk’s lions, with no enrichment or stimulation, and started thinking of these animals in the same way as I might judge domestic cows, my anger abated.
I wondered if Dirk might ever be persuaded to take up some other form of farming, but then I saw his two small sons playing in the garden. Each had a toy rifle and they were playing at shooting big game, stalking imaginary lions and leopards and buffalo.
“I’ve organized for you to go on a hunt, Kev. Are you still keen?” Dirk asked.
“Sure.” I didn’t know if I would have the nerve to watch a lion being shot, but Dirk’s client, a wealthy American businessman, would also be hunting other game on the farm.
That afternoon I climbed into the Land Cruiser and was introduced to Dirk’s client. I looked around for a rifle, but didn’t see one. “What are you going to shoot with?” The American drew a .44 Magnum pistol from a hand-tooled leather holster and proudly held it up for my inspection, its nickel-plated barrel glinting in the afternoon sun.
We left the farm and drove out into the bush. Dirk slowed the four-by-four and pointed off to the left. “Sable,” he said quietly.
“Where?” the American asked.
While Dirk gave an indication of where it was, I looked at the majestic creature. The sable is one of the most beautiful antelopes on the planet. The males have a jet black coat with white markings on their faces and are quite striking, while the females are a rich red-brown. What makes the sable—the males in particular—so attractive to trophy hunters are their long curved horns. A sable can kill a lion with a backwards thrust of his head, piercing his attacker with the sharp points.
“How much for that boy, Dirk?”
Dirk quoted a hefty figure in U.S. dollars and the deal was sealed.
Dirk drove closer, which surprised me, as I thought the hunter would want to get out of the vehicle and stalk the antelope on foot. Instead, we drove right up to the sable, which seemed accustomed to the sight of the vehicle. It had had a better life than the lions, roaming about in the bush of Dirk’s farm, but its time was about to come.
The hunter—and I now use the term loosely—leaned back in his seat in the open rear of the vehicle, drew his pistol, took aim, and fired. Blam, blam, blam, blam.
He fired four shots into the black skin, and although he hit the sable with at least one, it wasn’t dead. The sable started to run, though it was clearly in agony, thrashing about as it tried to escape the sudden terrible pain. Dirk took up his rifle, took aim through the telescopic sights, and squeezed the trigger. Mercifully, the sable dropped to the ground. Dirk, at least, knew what he was doing.
We drove to where it had fallen and the hunter lowered himself awkwardly to the ground, setting foot in the African dust for the first time that day. He waddled over to the sable, knelt by it, and lifted its head, posing for photographs as he proudly displayed his latest trophy.
As I watched this spectacle, I thought to myself, “You, sir, are not a hunter. You are a wanker.”
After that little display I decided to give the lion “hunt” a miss, although Dirk explained to me how it was going to work.
This wasn’t your archetypal cruel canned hunt, as Dirk was not the sort of farmer who would let the hunter shoot one of his lions through the wire of its cage. By lion farmer standards he had acted ethically, releasing a large male lion into an area of a thousand hectares, forty-eight hours before the hunt was due to take place. These were the regulations in force at the time.
While this sounds like the lion might have a sporting chance, it doesn’t work that way. If you release a lion that has lived in a small cage all its life into what is in effect just a larger enclosure, it is going to panic. He will run to the fence, and once he reaches it he will keep running along the fence line. I suspect this is the reason why the media has been able to get film of lions being shot through fences. Whether the cage is four meters by four, or a thousand hectares, the lion will probably still be on the fence when it gets shot. In other cases, farmers put a carcass deeper inside the enclosure, and once they know the lion has found it and started feeding, they drive or walk their client to where the action is happening, and say something like, “Check! This lion has made a kill! That shows you how wild it is. Let’s kill it now while it’s feeding!”
The same, I’m afraid, is true for a truly wild lion that has grown up in a finite area, such as a private game reserve. If the lion has been identified by the owners as suitable for hunting, it is tracked and figuratively marked with an X. The reserve’s owners will know where to find it, and when the hunter arrives from overseas that lion doesn’t stand a sporting chance of escaping its fate. One must realize that lion hunts cost a lot of money, and if the hunter doesn’t get his trophy, the farmer or land owner doesn’t get paid, so it’s in everyone’s interest—except the lion’s—that the cat is marked, tracked, and offered for slaughter.
The problem I have with lion farmers releasing a caged lion into a larger area is that the lion might not be killed with the first or even second shot. The quickest and most humane way of killing an animal with a bullet, to my way of thinking, is a brain shot. However, lion hunters don’t want to shoot their quarry in the head because it ruins the trophy. Instead, they aim for the heart-lung area, which is also an efficient way to kill the animal, but is a difficult target to hit. Sometimes they need two or three shots to end it quickly. If the hunter makes a mess of the shot then the wounded lion could easily hide himself inside the thousand-hectare enclosure and lie, in pain, for a couple of days until someone eventually finds him and finishes him off.
If I were a captive lion, bred on a lion farm to be killed, I think I would actually rather face my maker—or a rich American hunter—inside a four-meter by four-meter cage. At least it would be hard for him to miss at that range. Besides, no matter the size of the enclosure, the lion doesn’t stand a chance anyway.
After the media and public outcry over canned hunting, the government considered stopping the industry, but money got in the way of a decision being made.
Lion farming and hunting is big business. A trophy hunter will pay about $35,000 for a lion, so if a farmer only runs five hunts a year he is still making serious money. The lion farm I visited probably employed about forty African people. When the government announced it was considering banning hunting, there was an outcry from African farmers who were breeding donkeys for slaughter as food for the lion farms. A whole industry was under threat.
The debate about lion hunting is related to the management of lion populations on private game reserves. In many parts of South Africa wealthy individuals are buying up former farmland and rehabilitating it as private nature reserves. Even if the owners of a game farm are opposed to hunting, the reality of managing animal numbers eventually confronts them. In an enclosed reserve there is only enough room for a finite number of animals. The people who have a problem with lion hunting rarely seem to have an issue with the culling of species such as impala or kudu or wildebeest. However, as the debate about elephant culling stirs the passionate emotions of environmentalists, so too does the issue of lion hunting. What happens, for example, on a private game reserve where too many lion cubs are surviving to adulthood? Even a land owner who is opposed to hunting may be faced with the reality that it is far easier to shoot some of their lions—or have someone pay them for the privilege—than to go through the complicated processes of administering contraceptives to wild lions or darting and selling them to other reserves as live animals. Besides, there are few reserves that would purchase these lions, other than for hunting.
If you asked seven different people in South Africa to define canned hunting you would get seven different answers. Some people say it comes down to the size of the enclosure, but whether it’s four, ten, or twenty square meters, or two hundred, fifteen hundred, or two thousand hectares, a finite space is a finite space. Other people will tell you that a lion is not canned if it is allowed to feed off wild prey. My reply to that is that if a farmer is buying wildebeest or allowing them to breed to provide food for his lions—and probably culling a few wildebeest when there are too many—then that lion is farmed and, by extension, canned if it is offered to hunters.
What if a lion has been hand-raised and then released into the “wild” of a finite private reserve? As I said, we all have the place where we draw our line in the sand, and this is mine. I have a problem with any lion that has been hand-raised by human beings shot as a trophy later in life, rather than with arguing about the size of the enclosure in which it is hunted. My dog, Valentino, is a beautiful example of a Staffordshire terrier, but if one day hunters decided they wanted to hunt Staffies as trophy animals, there is no way I would accept any amount of money, no matter how large, to let someone shoot him. Why? Because I raised him from a pup. I couldn’t live with myself if I allowed someone to hunt and kill him. That would be taking blood money.
It’s the same with Tau and Napoleon, and I have had offers for their heads. They’re getting old now and in a year or two their teeth will be falling out, but that doesn’t mean that I could or would suddenly decide to make money out of someone killing them. They are a part of my family and I am a part of theirs. I have shared things with those two lions that I haven’t shared with people. I’ve ridden with them in the back of a truck most of the way from Johannesburg to Cape Town—something else I was told lion keepers shouldn’t do—just to make sure they were all right.
On the other hand, I don’t have a problem with people such as Dirk, the professional lion farmer and hunter, breeding lions for hunting. It is his constitutional right in this country to make a living that way, and as long as he is not being cruel to his lions and is keeping them in decent, clean enclosures and feeding them correctly, I cannot think of his lions as more important than any other farm animal.
I do have a problem with some facilities that are using their lions for dual purposes. On one hand, they operate as a petting zoo where young cubs are exposed to the public and begin to develop relationships with their keepers. Later in life those lions are sold off as trophies for slaughter. That’s an example of where a lion hunting farm starts to come into my territory, and I don’t like it.
When it comes to hunting lions in the wild, some people may be surprised to learn that I have no problem with this concept, as long as it is done professionally.
In Botswana, truly professional and ethical hunters have had long-term projects in place that involve monitoring prides of lions in the wild. Using identification charts, they can track the fortunes of individual lions and know their ages and positions in the pride. For example, when one or two pride males are ousted by younger lions then these animals’ days alive in the wild will be numbered. Shooting these lions, who are near the end of their lives, would not impact the viability of the prides in the area. At the same time, they would provide much more of a challenge to a hunter and, unlike in a canned hunt, there is no guarantee they would be taken, so each animal has a sporting chance.
This is an example of sustainable hunting, but sadly there are plenty of examples of unethical hunting in the wild. Shooting dominant males that have not yet been ousted from the pride can have disastrous consequences. If a younger male is able to take over a pride without challenging, then the natural order is distorted. For a start, he will kill cubs sired by the original pride male, and those cubs may have had a chance to grow to adulthood if the original male had been allowed to live until his time was over. Alternatively, as I’ve already mentioned, you can also have a situation where a male cub grows to adulthood and takes over his own pride, mating with the other females in his family.
In a way, hunting is like any other farming business. You have a commodity, and you make money out of it by selling it to someone else. In this case, the commodity is a living creature’s life.
I don’t begrudge an ethical lion hunter making money out of lions, any more than I would think it wrong for a fair cattle farmer to sell his animals for slaughter. Where things start to go wrong is when greed and money, in the absence of ethics, become the motivating factor for hunting. A cattle farmer who treats his animals poorly in order to cut his margins is as bad as a lion hunter who shoots a male lion in its prime. An unethical lion hunter’s not worse than a poor cattle farmer—despite what the media might say. They’re each as bad as the other.
Flying home from Dirk’s farm by myself, I had time to think about what I had seen and what I had learned. In turn, it made me think a little bit more deeply about my own spiritual beliefs and how they related to the animals I knew and worked with every day.
As a teenager I had been an altar boy for a while in the Anglican Church. Mom wanted me to be one, and I told her I would as long as she let me drive the Mini. She agreed, so it wasn’t a bad deal, but I let my religion slip until Lisa and her family persuaded me to start going back to church. Even then I think I was doing it to impress her, in part. In my life I’ve always known, in my heart, the difference between right and wrong. Sometimes, when I was younger, I chose wrong. These days, however, I still have my faith, and Mandy and I go to church most weeks for the right reasons, and not because I’m trying to impress someone or get something in return.
The evening before I left, Dirk and his family invited me to have dinner with them. Before we started eating we all joined hands and bowed our heads. “Thank you, Lord, for everything we have on this farm and thank you for the food we are about to eat. Amen,” said Dirk. For a moment I thought to myself, “This is so wrong. How can these people slaughter lions and yet maintain their Christian faith.” In the peaceful solitude of the airplane’s cockpit I realized that if I had sat down to dinner with a cattle or sheep farming family, I would have had no such reservations and I was embarrassed to have been such a hypocrite and so wrong in using my faith to judge them.
I pray about things in my life and for guidance about what I do with my animals. If it is the will of God, I hope to continue doing what I do for a very long time. I find that having spiritual beliefs helps with my decision-making—being able to know or make a judgment on what is right or wrong—and with my personal ethics. My “faith” in terms of how I live with my animals and how I work with them is the same as my faith in the church. I am not an evangelist, and I do not seek to force my methods of working with animals on to other lion keepers any more than I would try and convert someone to Christianity. I’m more than happy to help someone on the right path, whether it be in life, faith, or animal-keeping, if they are minded to ask for my help, but I am not someone who will sit in judgment on others.
Who was I, I thought as I looked out over the wild beauty of Africa from above, to say that the life of a lion was more important than that of a cow?