Sixteen years of research and lobbying against South Africa’s predator breeding and ‘canned’ lion hunting practices recently reached a climax for Plettenberg Bay resident and Eden to Addo director Ian Michler – Mellisa Reitz reports

The story of Ian Michler’s quest is revealed in the hard-hitting documentary Blood Lions that had its first screenings at the Durban International Film Festival last week.

The 85-minute film, which received standing ovations and an overwhelming global response, follows the journey of investigative journalist Michler, and that of American hunter Rick Swazey, who buys a lion online and then comes out to South Africa to see how easy it is to shoot it.

Many well-known conservationists and welfare experts are interviewed in the film, providing a compelling narrative that exposes the horrors behind the multi- million dollar industry and the false conservation claims made by operators.

The film also exposes cub- petting and ‘walking with lions’ operations as nothing other than lucrative commercial operations with no conservation merits at all.

Locally produced by Regulus Vision in collaboration with the Wildlands Conservation Trust, Blood Lions is directed by Bruce Young and well-known filmmaker Nick Chevallier.

The film has been accepted at film festivals worldwide and will be screened in the European and Australian Parliaments.

The Blood Lions campaign, which aims at bringing an end to canned hunting and the exploitative breed- ing of predators on farms across South Africa, will also be given a significant boost by the film’s release.

The inhumane practice of breeding lions for the sport of hunting them under captive conditions is still, surprisingly, legal in South Africa. Although previous Environmental minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk called the practice “a cancer” in our country, present minister Edna Molewa seems to think otherwise.

She claims that canned hunting is banned and refers instead to the practices as “captive” hunting, stating that the latter is legal if the animal is not tranquillized.

However, almost all conservationists disagree with her. They claim the word- play is an attempt to hide the reality: lions are still being bred in captivity to be shot in captivity.

According to Michler’s research, approximately 1,000 lions are being shot annually and about 1,100 are being killed for the burgeoning lion bone trade in the East.

With up to 7,000 lions in captivity across the country, there are roughly as few as 3,000 left in the wild, and the industry continues to grow with the Eastern Cape region being one of the busiest.

Just last year, well-known Port Elizabeth lion park Seaview was refused its annual rates rebate after Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality accused it of participating in canned hunting by selling lions to the Cradock hunting reserve Tam Safaris, and tigers to South Africa’s leading bone exporter, Letsatsi la Africa in the Free State.

“The captive breeding industry has no conservation and rehabilitation value whatsoever,” says Michler, who adds that no lion ecologist or recognised conservation agency supports these breeding facilities.

Michler, who is the special consultant to Blood Lions, has taken the campaign beyond South African borders, addressing parliamentarians in Australia and European countries to raise awareness.

As a result, the Australian government placed a Permanent ban on the importation of all lion parts and trophies into Australia earlier this year. He hopes that both Europe and the USA will soon take a similar stance.

“Although the global response to the film and campaign has been overwhelming, we are not yet at the end of the road as we still need to change legislation and ban this practice in South Africa altogether,” says Michler, adding that although there is no progress yet, our government has now shown a willingness to engage with the campaign.

Screenings of Blood Lions, hosted by Eden to Addo, will be scheduled for the Garden Route – visit www.bloodlions.org  for dates and information,

Cape Town – An American hunter Walter Palmer, with a reported hunting felony history in the US, stands accused of illegally killing a protected lion in Zimbabwe.

The 13-year-old lion, known as Cecil, was literally a superstar of the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe as part of a research programme.

In a statement made on Tuesday, Palmer indirectly laid the blame at the feet of the professional hunting company he enlisted, saying he thought everything about his trip was legal and that he wasn’t aware of the animal’s status “until the end of the hunt”.

‘Walter Palmer’ is currently trending world wide on Twitter with his dentist practice reportedly closed for business and his Facebook account is being inundated with damning posts about the kill. A ‘Walter Palmer awareness account’ has even been created, while a tribute instagram account has been created for Cecil.

The industry needs to clean up its act

WildAid executive director Peter Knights has said in response to Cecil’s killing, he has seen a series of ethical problems in Africa’s hunting industry over the last few years.

“The industry needs to clean up its act, and it needs to be the first to condemn this action,” said Knights.

“Hunting can have benefits to conservation. It can generate revenue to conserve habitat, and it can help local communities. But it must be done ethically, and it must be done legally. And it seems that in this case those rules have been broken.”

Canned hunting has been heavily scrutinized of late as a controversial documentary Blood Lions has drummed up awareness of the sordid conditions with in which these Lions are bread in order to feed SA’s lucrative hunting industry  – said to be one of the few places in the world where they are bread for the sole purpose of being hunted.

An estimated 6 000 lions are currently confined in about 150 breeding facilities across South Africa.

Adding to the wave of controversy is the decision by South African Airways Cargo to re-start its transportation of legal hunting trophies, including lions and rhino. The airline initially imposed the embargo three months ago in April 2015 after an incident in which hunting trophies were allegedly shipped to Perth, Australia under a false label of ‘mechanical equipment’.

SAA Cargo announced the lifting of the embargo in a cargo policy and procedures advisory, dated 20 July 2015, saying the airline had been engaging with the Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA). It said the DEA’s implementation of “additional compliance measures for permits and documentation” caused the airline to review its embargo.

Minister Edna Molewa recently met with stakeholders to address the mounting public concern about the controversial practice  – especially as a new international report by TRAFFIC throws light on the growing trade in lion bones, involving hundreds of South African lion carcasses exported annually to supply the traditional Asian medicine market, says Andreas Wilson-Spath.

“The DEA’s official statement about the meeting reveals a fundamental disagreement over what constitutes ‘canned hunting’ in South Africa,” Wilson-Spath said.

Following the discussions and in an unprecedented move, the Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa (PHASA) has been told that its “position on lion hunting is no longer tenable”.

According to a Conservation Action Trust update, an email sent to PHASA members by the organisation’s president, Hermann Meyeridricks, asked for a review of its policy on the matter ahead of its next annual general meeting.

Meyeridricks said PHASA has made “little demonstrable progress” in getting government and predator breeders to “clean up” the country’s lucrative but controversial captive-bred lion hunting industry. He is calling for it to improve its standards and conditions to a “generally acceptable level”, acknowledging that opposition to the hunting of bred lions is no longer confined to “just a small if vociferous group of animal-rights activists”.

The idea that the hunting of captive-bred lions represents a legitimated and sustainable use of a wildlife species is turning, despite the fact that it is seen by the government as a “key driver of economic growth, skill development and job creation in the sector”.

And what the shock killing of Cecil the lion indicates, irrespective of the hunt having taken place in Zimbabwe, is that the issue of organisations that fail to follow procedure and who continue to operate illegally, as now called into question by PHASA, requires more than just regulation clarity and refinement.

The cat’s out of the bag with the screening of Blood Lions at the film festival

GOING undercover to make a documentary has its risks, especially regarding litigation and personal safety. But sometimes it’s worth the risk, says executive producer of Blood Lions, Andrew Venter.

Blood Lions is a documentary that premiered at this year’s Durban International Film Festival. The movie blows the lid on how vague legislation in South Africa has allowed the practice of “canned lion hunting” to become a multi-million rand industry largely governed by private property holders.

“I’ll kill you. I warn you. Don’t take a photo of me,” said a Benkoe Safari operator captured on hidden camera confronting the Blood Lions’ film crew. The crew were hounded out of the safari lodge, but they had what they wanted. Soon, audiences around the world will view the altercation and all that led up to it.

At the first schools’ screening of Blood Lions to pupils in Durban this week, a child, asked: “Isn’t what you did, filming people without permission, using hidden cameras, illegal?”

The film-makers’ responded that they had needed to go undercover to expose the dark side of captive-bred lion hunting. “Nearly all these lions you have seen here in this movie, even the cute cuddly cubs, end up being shot for a price,” said Blood Lions narrator and journalist, Ian Michler.

He said more than 7 000 lions – more than double the number of wild lions in South Africa – had been bred for one purpose only, the bullet.

The film follows Michler into lion breeding territory, speaking to trophy hunters, operators, breeders, lion ecologists, conservationists, and animal welfare experts. It also documents the two-day trip of America hunter, Rick Swazey, after he selected, on the internet, a lion to kill at Benkoe Safaris. He had been sent pictures of 14 lions to choose from, ranging in cost from $5 400 (R65 000) for a female to $48 000 for a big black-maned lion. Swazey was granted permission to video his kill, but owner of the lodge, Ben Duminy clearly became suspicious of the intentions of the cameraman, Blood Lions’ codirector, Nic Chevallier.

“Is this for a newspaper or TV?” Duminy asks on camera, confronting Chevallier and slapping down his camera.

Michler said this scene, and all the other glimpses they had got into the operations of Benkoe Safaris were indications of a typical “canned lion hunting” business, albeit marketed under guise of professional hunting. “There is no element of fair chase – the kill is guaranteed, and the packaging of this as a wildlife hunt is pure farce,” said Michler.

The chairman of the SA Predators Association, Pieter Potgieter, spoke on behalf of the owner of Benkoe Safaris. Potgieter said to describe the lion hunts taking place on Benkoe Lodge as canned hunting was a “very wrong assumption”. “These people are beating that canned lion hunting drum when we have long moved beyond that situation. Canned hunting is illegal, and my members do not engage it,” said Potgieter.

He said he deplored the use of hidden cameras to tell the Blood Lions story. “We are often victims of these techniques. Even Carte Blanche did it. We think it is a low-level form of journalism.”

The president and the chief executive of the Professional Hunters Association of South Africa, (Phasa) Herman Meyeridricks, and Adri Kitshoff flew to Durban to view the documentary on Thursday evening. Meyeridricks said he had no issue with the use of hidden cameras to tell the story, describing it as modern day investigative journalism.

“I thought it was a well-made documentary,” said Meyeridricks. “Blood Lions gives us a lot to ponder as far as lion hunting is concerned, but I do not agree with everything in the movie… There are arguments for hunting, and substantial evidence of how it contributes to conservation and community development.”

He said hunting was recognised by Cites, the World Wildlife Fund, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature as a legitimate conservation measure that raised massive revenue for game reserves.

In a letter sent to all Phasa members on Friday, Meyeridricks said: “Our position on lion hunting is no longer tenable. The matter will be on the agenda again for our next AGM and I appeal to you to give it your serious consideration, so that together we can deliver a policy that is defensible in the court of public opinion.”