Blood Lions: the documentary on South Africa's captive lion industry

Released in 2015, Blood Lions argued that cub petting, lion walks, trophy hunting and the lion bone trade are not separate businesses but one, and it is the reason a great many people first heard the phrase canned hunting.

Before the film, the captive lion industry in South Africa was a subject for specialist conservation publications and the occasional newspaper investigation. Afterwards it was a subject people argued about at dinner. That shift, more than any single fact the film contained, is what Blood Lions is remembered for.

What the film is

Blood Lions is a South African documentary from 2015, co-directed by Bruce Young and Nick Chevallier. Its central figure is Ian Michler, a conservationist and safari operator who had been writing about the captive predator industry for years before the cameras arrived. The film premiered at the Durban International Film Festival and was later broadcast in the United States by MSNBC, which is how most of its American audience found it.

A campaign of the same name continued after the film itself, working with tour operators, volunteer agencies and travel companies rather than only with audiences. That second life matters to the story, because the film's practical effect came less from a single broadcast than from the years of pressure that used it as a reference point.

The argument it made

The film's argument is structural, and it can be stated in a paragraph. Captive lion breeding in South Africa produces far more animals than the tourism side can house for their full lives. The tourism side is where the money starts: visitors pay to hold cubs, and paying volunteers cover the labour of raising them. But cubs grow, and a grown captive lion is expensive to feed, impossible to release and difficult to place. The film's case is that the far end of that arrangement is enclosed trophy hunting and the export of lion skeletons, and that the friendly end and the far end are financially joined even when they are legally separate businesses under separate ownership.

What made the case land was not indignation. It was the ordinariness of the transactions the film followed. One thread traces an overseas buyer arranging the purchase of a captive lioness, showing how routine and how unobstructed such a purchase is. The point being made is not that a law has been broken. The point is that no law needed breaking.

The chain the film described

Set out step by step, the sequence the film describes runs like this. A lioness in a breeding facility produces a litter. The cubs are removed within days, which brings her back into breeding condition sooner than she would come naturally. The cubs go to a petting enclosure, where visitors pay to handle them and volunteers pay to feed them. When they outgrow handling they are used for walking encounters with tourists on foot. When they outgrow that, they are surplus.

Each of those stages exists independently and each has its own defenders. Read together, the film argues, they form a single supply arrangement in which the cost of raising a lion is paid by tourists and the animal's final value is realised by someone else.

The volunteer question

Blood Lions gave particular attention to volunteers, and this is the part of the film that had the most immediate commercial consequence. International volunteers were recruited with conservation language: hand-rearing orphaned cubs, contributing to a breeding programme, helping to restore a threatened species. The film's contention is that the animals were not orphans, the breeding served the market rather than any wild population, and the volunteers were paying to supply free labour to a commercial operation whose end product they would have objected to.

Volunteer placement agencies came under sustained pressure after the film, and a number of them removed captive predator projects from their listings. Oyster.com, which reviews such placements, had already named the Lion Park among the most controversial animal attractions, an assessment it published in five languages. The volunteer programme at the Lion Park is one of the reasons the park's name appears in this argument at all.

How the industry answered

The response from breeders and from parts of the hunting sector was that the film generalised. Captive breeding, on their account, takes hunting pressure off wild lions, supports rural employment, and involves animals that were never wild and never would have been. Predator breeders' representatives rejected the characterisation of their members as a single industry with a single output, and objected that the film treated the worst operators as typical.

The professional hunting side had a harder time answering, and its position moved. The professional hunters' association in South Africa voted to distance itself from the hunting of captive-bred lions, then reversed that position, then revisited it again. That sequence of reversals is itself a piece of evidence about how contested the practice had become inside the hunting industry, not only outside it.

Where the Lion Park fits

The film is not about one park, and it does not need to be. Its subject is a category of business. The Lion Park enters the conversation because it was among the most visible places in the country where the tourist-facing end of that category could be seen: a drive-through park near Johannesburg where cub petting was offered for years and where paying volunteers helped raise the animals.

The park later announced that it would bar the petting of lion cubs, a decision reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune and by Michigan's Thumb. Whether that decision is best read as a response to the argument the film crystallised, or as a commercial judgement about what visitors had started to expect, is not something the reporting settles.

What followed

The clearest consequence was in policy, not in film criticism. Over the years after the release, South African environmental policy moved from defending the captive predator sector to reviewing it, and eventually to accepting a recommendation that the country stop breeding lions in captivity for hunting and for the bone trade. The history of that shift involves a court challenge to export quotas, a ministerial review panel, and a good deal of argument about how an industry of that size could be wound down at all.

Blood Lions did not cause that on its own, and nobody involved has claimed it did. It gave the argument a name that fits in a headline, which is a different kind of usefulness.