Shamba the lion should never have been killed for behaving like a wild animal

Headlines about the “brutal savagery” of Shamba the lion, who was shot dead after he dragged a safari park owner across an enclosure in South Africa this week, are ridiculously misguided. The simple reality is that Shamba was executed for behaving like a wild animal, rather than the compliant, lucrative asset his captors expected him to be.

Eyewitnesses screamed when Shamba first grabbed Mike Hodge, the man who owned the park. I’m sure Shamba’s actions seemed shocking in the moment but, given the reality of the lion’s life experiences, they are not so surprising.

The website for the Marakele Animal Sanctuary invites visitors to its star attraction: the Predator Centre, where they are told they can “take a walk on the wild side”.

Those who previously took up the offer were driven through the lion’s enclosure in a purpose-built Lion Mobile and promised that Shamba would “jump up on the top of the truck and look you in the eye”. The website states this would create “a super photo opportunity to be had by all”.

Well, not quite all. One can only imagine how provocative all this was for Shamba, who was routinely reduced to an unwitting Instagram model, teased and taunted into a holiday snap to be liked and shared by tourists.

In a particularly gruesome gimmick, Shamba was trained to lunge at freshly slaughtered chickens that were hung from the bars for him. Wide-eyed visitors would gawk and film as the lion attacked the birds’ corpses and their feathers filled the air.

All those birds were slaughtered to provide a cheap moment of drama involving a lion, who was himself ultimately killed when he strayed from rules that could never have been explained to him and which ran entirely contrary to his nature.

There is no secret surrounding the nature of lions or other big cats. In art and popular culture they are a leading archetype of danger. We don’t speak about the danger of entering the metaphorical lion’s den for nothing. To put Shamba in such taunting scenarios seems dangerous, to say the least.

Animals were not born for our entertainment, yet that is what they are abused for across the globe. At many animal tourist attractions the discomfort and cruelty the creatures suffer is not immediately clear. World Animal Protection found that thousands of elephants across Asia are kept in horrendous, abusive conditions by tourism chiefs. A particularly sad fact reported after their research is that baby elephants are often torn from their mothers, restrained in their pens and beaten for weeks before being offered up by smiling tourism workers for photos and rides.

Tigers provided for selfies in Thailand have usually been taken from their mothers as very young cubs. The cages and chains they are kept in are hidden from tourists’ view. Monkeys, dolphins and turtles have suffered their own hell behind the scenes. Perhaps the real surprise is that animals are not quicker to turn against the humans who exploit them. But then, unlike Shamba, most do not get the chance.

Although what happened with Shamba has made headlines, death sentences for animals who stray from expectations are commonplace. Whenever we read a news report about a dog mauling a human, the story nearly always ends with a cold, emotionless sentence, informing us that the dog was put down after the incident. Man’s best friend executed without a second’s thought the moment it behaves as it was originally bred to.

Most will say that it was right to shoot the lion because Hodge may have died otherwise. But in the video of the incident Shamba seems more curious more than murderous. If lions want to tear a creature apart, they do not hesitate. It’s hard to say how much danger Hodge was really in; his injuries include broken bones but lions raised alongside humans often don’t realise their own strength relative to their owners’.

Neither did the onlookers hesitate. As the star attraction strayed from the script, the audience quickly turned against him. An onlooker shouts: “Get a rifle – just in case.”

Of course Mike Hodge should have been saved – but was there really any need for Shamba to have died in order to achieve this? To shoot a wild animal for behaving true to its nature is true savagery.