Guest Post by Chris Mercer
“A South African Tourist industry with a sinister side” – Clarissa Ward, presenter for CBS News respected TV show 60 Minutes.
Watch this 14-minute segment to learn why lion cub petting is ‘sinister.’
As a travel agent/tour operator, you have a particular responsibility to promote responsible tourism. Promoting ethical tourism with regard to animal welfare is spelled out in animal welfare guidelines published by ABTA in UK.
But you must also have a conscience when it comes to making yourself an accomplice to hunting atrocities exposed in this 5-min video clip: it is not only lions who are used as living targets for the sadistic urges of hunting thugs!
Everyone should know by now what canned lion hunting is; how lions brutally captured in the wild were used to build up a lion farming industry that now numbers some 8000 lions in South Africa, all being bred for a cruel death by bullet, or, very often, a painful, lingering death by bow and arrow.
The tourism industry should also know by now that:
The South African government both permits and promotes the canned hunting industry and its spin-offs, like cub petting.
Virtually every cub that is petted by a tourist in SA will end up being brutally hunted in an enclosure or fenced camp.
Lion farms and the tourist resorts which rent cubs from them, are practiced in the art of deceiving you and your clients into believing that they have no links with the canned hunters. They lie!
Recently, years of lies about the fate of their lions were exposed at Seaview, near Port Elizabeth, and the Lion Park, near Johannesburg. But all the facilities that offer cub petting are involved. Don’t be fooled!
Even if you believe the protestations of resorts offering cub petting, that they have no links whatever with canned hunting, you should still boycott them for all the other cruelty involved in captive breeding; the unnatural speed breeding of females, their miserable lives in captivity, and the stress in the cubs of being ripped away from their mothers at birth and then being handled constantly by demanding tourists.
What we ask of you?
Boycott all facilities in SA that offer lion cub petting. No exceptions!
Share this message to your own national tourism/travel association so that we can agree a Protocol with them that promotes ethical tourism, and places animal welfare on your agenda.
Should you wish to join us pro-actively in stamping out cub petting/canned lion hunting, we can publish your firm’s details on the ethical tour operators page of our website which gets anything between 2000 and 8000 hits a day.
Chris Mercer
Campaign Against Canned Hunting
