Nature Studies: The commercial hunting trade has hit a new low with lions being taken to the slaughter

It’s hard to believe until you see the images – and then you feel sick.

Thousands of lions are now being bred in captivity every year in South Africa so that foreign trophy hunters can shoot them with a minimum of difficulty, a powerful new film reveals this week. The lions are being intensively farmed like livestock because of the huge sums of money to be made in “canned hunting”, where the animals are released into confined areas in which they can be easily tracked and killed.

Overseas hunters, largely from the US and Europe, are paying tens of thousands of dollars for the guaranteed kill of a beast which is not really wild at all, but which still possesses a magnificent trophy head which can then be taken home and boastfully hung upon the wall.

The situation is shaming, and it is dramatically illustrated in a new film, Blood Lions, made by a group of South African conservationists, and which will have its first British showing in London on Friday. The film reveals how the two interlinked practices of captive lion breeding and canned hunting, which once were frowned upon, have exploded in the past five years, such are the financial returns.

According to the South African government’s own estimate, as many as 200 big-game ranches are now holding between 6,000 and 8,000 captive-bred lions. Forecasts indicate that this may rise to as many as 20,000 confined animals by 2020. All are being “bred for the bullet” – quite legally – spending most of their lives in small, dirty, bare-earth compounds behind chain-link fences, before being sent off to hunting operators to be shot down.

As animal welfare abuse it is bad enough. But fears are growing that a side-effect of large-scale captive lion breeding, the lion bone trade, may pose a new and major conservation threat to populations of wild lions all over Africa – which, especially in the west, east and central parts of the continent, are rapidly tumbling in numbers. From about 80,000 in 1979, they are now down in total to somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000.

For when the trophy head is taken after the hunter’s kill, the rest of the carcass has a growing value in Asia, with lion bones being used to replace the tiger bones which were once a valued ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, but are increasingly hard to obtain. A lion carcass is worth about $1,000 (£660) to the breeder, but by the time they get to Asia the bones may be worth $10,000 to $20,000 – prices which may pose the same sort of threat to lions as the ivory trade does to wild elephants.

“Once you start talking about these sorts of numbers, poachers are going to go out and target lions wherever they are,” explained Will Travers, president of the Born Free Foundation, the British conservation charity which is hosting the showing of Blood Lions at the Royal Geographical Society on Friday evening.

The film features the South African breeding farms and hunting ranches where captive-bred, canned hunting is carried out; but it also makes clear that many South Africans find the whole business disgusting.

It quotes the South African Minister of Tourism, Derek Hanekom, as saying: “Is this something that we feel proud of as a nation? My feeling is: I’m not proud of it. I think we should consider stronger measures to control if not to ban the breeding of lions in captivity, because we simply don’t need it in terms of our conservation effort.”

Yet at the moment the practice is fully legal – and it is booming, driven by the trophy industry. Conservationists believe that it can only be halted by stopping the trophy trade.

Only last week France did just that, banning the importation of all lion trophies, following Australia, which made the move earlier this year. Britain, however, seems unlikely to follow suit. As Travers said: “Canned hunting leaves behind a trail littered with the rotting bloody corpses of its helpless and hopeless victims, and it may jeopardise the survival of Africa’s wild lions.

“The UK government and the rest of the EU must follow France and ban all lion trophy imports – now.”