Part of the Pride (19 page)

“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?

NINE
 
Cheeky Cheetahs and Jealous Jackals