The Lion Park at Honeydew, near Lanseria: its history and what became of it

A drive-through wildlife park stood in Gauteng, north-west of Johannesburg, on one of the roads that carries traffic out toward the Cradle of Humankind. Visitors went through it in their own cars, past camps holding lions and other predators. The operation no longer trades under this name: it was rebranded as Lion & Safari Park and moved to a different site.

AI

Where it stood

The park sat on the northern edge of the Johannesburg conurbation, in the stretch of Gauteng where the suburbs give way to smallholdings, game fencing and dirt turn-offs. The address was Honeydew, at the corner of Malibongwe Drive and the R114, and the park was usually described as lying near Lanseria, because there is not much else nearby to locate it against.

That position mattered. Drivers leaving Johannesburg for the fossil sites of the Cradle of Humankind, which UNESCO added to the World Heritage List in 1999, took a route that ran past the park, and so did traffic bound for Hartbeespoort Dam and the resorts along its shoreline. A visitor with a free morning could put a lion camp and a set of hominin caves into the same drive without doubling back on themselves, which is the kind of arithmetic that fills a car park.

Close enough to the city to be a half-day outing. Far enough out to feel like leaving it.

What kind of place it was

It was a drive-through park, which is a specific thing and not a synonym for a zoo. Visitors stayed in their own vehicles, entered fenced camps through a gated airlock arrangement, and drove internal roads with the animals loose around the car. The barrier between a person and a lion was the vehicle itself, plus the rules attached to being in it, and those rules were the whole of the safety design.

The format was not a South African invention. It arrived from Britain in the second half of the 1960s, after Longleat in Wiltshire opened lion enclosures that cars drove into, and the idea was copied quickly across Europe, North America and southern Africa because it solved an awkward problem cheaply: it let a small site show large dangerous animals without building a large dangerous-animal house. What South African parks added was climate and space. A lion camp on the highveld does not need heating, and the grass and thorn cover look approximately like the country the animals would occupy anyway.

Predators were held in their own camps, apart from the plains game. That separation is standard, and it is the reason a visitor could pass a giraffe and a lion within a few minutes of one another without either of them being in reach of the other. The species a park of this kind holds, and how those camps are usually arranged, is set out on the page about the animals kept at the park.

The lions, and the people who worked with them

Lions were the reason the park existed and the reason most people had heard of it. They were also the reason it produced a run of internationally circulated stories that had nothing much to do with each other.

Two handlers are associated with the site by name. Alex Larenty worked there as a lion handler and became known well beyond South Africa through footage of him rubbing insect repellent into a lion's paws, a clip that travelled under the label "lion massage" and was picked up by outlets from Israel to Peru. Kevin Richardson, a zoologist whose work with captive lions has been documented at length, also has recorded ties to the site. Neither man's presence there is in dispute; what is often confused is which of them any given piece of coverage was actually about. That confusion, and the footage behind it, is dealt with on the page about the keepers who worked the lions.

Cub handling, volunteers, and the argument that followed

For years the park let visitors handle lion cubs. Cub petting was, for a long period, one of the things a South African wildlife park could offer that a European zoo could not, and it drew both paying visitors and a steady stream of international volunteers who came to hand-raise the animals. The park later announced that it would stop the practice.

The announcement landed in the middle of a much larger argument about captive lion breeding in South Africa. Conservation critics have long linked cub petting to a supply chain: cubs bred to be handled are later walked with tourists, and animals from that system can end up in enclosed trophy hunts, the practice usually called canned hunting. The documentary Blood Lions is the best-known treatment of that chain and did more than any single piece of reporting to attach the words "cub petting" to the words "canned hunting" in the public mind. Oregonlive covered trophy-hunting operations breeding what it called "Frankenstein freaks of nature".

The park's cub offering, the volunteer programme attached to it, and the criticism aimed at both are covered on the pages about cub petting and where the cubs went and the volunteer programme. Oyster.com listed the park among what it called the most controversial animal attractions, in five languages.

The death of a visitor in 2015

In 2015 an American visitor, Katherine Chappell, was killed by a lioness while being driven through the park. She was photographing from the vehicle when the animal reached in through an open window. Chappell worked in visual effects and her credits included Game of Thrones, which is why a death in a Gauteng game camp became a front-page item in newsrooms with no interest in South African wildlife policy.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the lion lunged through an open car window and fatally mauled the American tourist. CBC News and NBC News carried the same account, and the story was picked up by HuffPost, the Telegraph, Fox News, ABC News, Aftonbladet, Diário de Notícias, ynet and 24.hu. UPI's headline ran "'Game of Thrones' employee attacked by lion". What each outlet reported, and how the account settled over the following days, is set out on the page about the 2015 death and the reporting of it. That page does not reconstruct the incident. Which outlet led with the television credit and which with the mechanism, and how little of it reached the argument about captive lions, is followed here.

Visitors, and one giraffe

The park had the kind of public profile that produces guest lists and viral clips in roughly equal measure. Natalie Portman, Shakira, Chris Daughtry and Timberland are among those recorded as having visited; the record here goes no further than the fact of the visit, and is kept on the page about visitors of note.

Separately, a giraffe wandered into the restaurant area. Fox News and the New York Daily News both ran it. It is a small story and it travelled further than most of the serious ones.

The name after the park

The operation was rebranded as Lion & Safari Park and relocated to a new site near Hartbeespoort. The business that exists today is not this one under a different sign in the same field; the address changed as well as the name. Anyone with a practical question about visiting, opening times or bookings needs to take it to that operator directly, because this record answers for nothing and sells nothing. What happened to the name is covered on the page about the rebranding and the move.

Older travel writing, older news coverage and a long tail of links still use the original name, sometimes interchangeably with the new one, which is why this record keeps it.