![]() For an animal that is usually weaned at six months, missing out on the crucial colostrum, or first milk, can cause ill-health. They say breeders remove the cubs from their mother so that the lioness will quickly become fertile again, as they squeeze as many cubs from their adults as possible – five litters every two years. After a day or two I don't think she remembered that she had cubs."Īnimal welfare experts disagree, however. She says the mother is not distressed: "She's looking for the cubs for a few hours but it's not like she's sad. After dark, as the lions roar in the cages below the pub veranda, Maryke Van Der Merwe, the manager of Lion's Den and daughter of the ranch owner, explains that if the cubs weren't separated from their mother – by blowing a horn to scare the adult lion away – the young lions would starve to death, because their mother had no milk. But Cathleen Benade, a ranch assistant who is studying wildlife photography and is devoted to the cubs, reveals that they were taken away from their mothers just an hour after birth and bottle-fed by humans for the first eight weeks of their life. Two healthy looking tigers tear at chicken carcasses rapidly rotting in the African sun. At the far end of the property is an abandoned farm, surrounded by pens of lethargic-looking big cats. Herds of blue wildebeest, red hartebeest and eland run from the truck, then stop and watch us, warily: according to the guides, the animals seem to know when visitors are not carrying guns. After a cuddle with the cubs, I go on a "game drive" through the 2,000 hectare estate. Like other tourists and daytrippers from Jo'burg, I pay a more modest £3.50 to hug the lions at Moreson, a game ranch which on its website invites tourists to come and enjoy the canned hunting of everything from pretty blesbok and springbok – South Africa's national symbol – to lions and crocodiles. forHe pays anything from £5,000 to £25,000, and it is all completely legal. A fully-grown, captive-bred lion is taken from its pen to an enclosed area where it wanders listlessly for some hours before being shot dead by a man with a shotgun, hand-gun or even a crossbow, standing safely on the back of a truck. The easy slaughter of animals in fenced areas is called "canned hunting", perhaps because it's rather like shooting fish in a barrel. While the owners of this ranch insist they do not hunt and kill their lions, animal welfare groups say most breeders sell their stock to be shot dead by wealthy trophy-hunters from Europe and North America, or for traditional medicine in Asia. There are now more lions held in captivity (upwards of 5,000) in the country than live wild (about 2,000). Moreson ranch is one of more than 160 such farms legally breeding big cats in South Africa. ![]()
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