Where the operation went after the rebrand to Lion & Safari Park

The park documented on this site no longer exists under that name or at that address. The operation continues as Lion & Safari Park, at a different site near Hartbeespoort, and the distinction between the two matters for almost everything else written here.

The fact of the change

Two changes happened together: the name and the location. The business that ran the Lion Park at Honeydew, near Lanseria, now trades as Lion & Safari Park, and it does so from a different property in the Hartbeespoort area: in July 2016 it moved to a site on the R512 near Broederstroom, in North West province.

That is the whole of what this page asserts about the current operation, and it is deliberate. Everything below concerns how to read the older material, not how the present business runs.

The practical effect for a reader is small but worth stating plainly. Directions, references and links that point at the old address point at a place that is no longer the park. Material written before the change describes the former site even when it uses a name that still exists.

Why the two sites should not be read as one

Almost all the material on this site describes a specific property at a specific address over a specific period. The predator camps visitors drove through, the cub handling that was offered for years, the volunteer programme, the 2015 death of an American visitor: those belong to the old site.

Applying any of it to the current operation would be careless in both directions. It would attribute to a present-day business the conditions of a site it no longer occupies, and it would blur a record that is only useful if it stays precise about what happened where.

The safer habit is to treat the older material as historical and the present operation as a separate subject that this record does not cover. Anyone whose interest is the current business is looking in the wrong place here.

What a change of this kind involves

Moving a wildlife operation is not like moving a shop. Animals have to be transported and re-established, enclosures and fencing have to exist before anything arrives, and permits attach to the property as much as to the operator.

A new site is also an opportunity to lay things out differently, because an existing park is constrained by decisions made decades earlier. Roads, camp boundaries and the position of the entrance are extremely difficult to change once animals live inside them.

None of that is a claim about what was actually built at the new location. It is the general shape of the problem, and it is why relocations of this type are rare enough to be notable when they happen.

It also has a bearing on how the two sites compare. A property laid out from scratch, by people who already knew what the previous one had got wrong, is not a copy of the old one moved sideways. Assuming otherwise is the most common error made about this change, and it runs through a good deal of what is written about the park online.

The name itself

The change from Lion Park to Lion & Safari Park does one visible thing: it widens the subject. The first name describes a place holding lions. The second describes a place holding lions and a broader wildlife offering alongside them.

Whether that reflects a change in what is kept, a change in how it is presented, or both, is not something this record can establish. What can be said is that the older name became strongly associated with a specific set of stories, and that names carrying that much association are difficult to keep unchanged.

Naming also affects who finds the place. A search for the old name now returns two things at once: an operating business and a decade of reporting about a site that business has left. Sorting one from the other is most of what a reader arriving at this subject has to do, and it is the reason this page exists at all.

What is not established

The reasons for the move are not established here, and no timeline connecting it to any other event is asserted.

It is easy to line the events up and let the sequence imply a cause. Cub handling drew sustained criticism. A visitor was killed in 2015 and the case was reported worldwide, an account of which is set out on the page covering it. The park announced it would stop allowing cub petting. The operation later carried a new name at a new site. Those are separate facts, and putting them in a row does not make one the reason for the next.

Where the reporting supports a connection, this record states it. Where it does not, the gap stays visible rather than being filled with something plausible.

Where practical questions belong

Questions about admission, hours, what is offered, what is kept and how any of it is run are questions for the operator that exists today. They are answered by that business and by nobody else, and the answers change.

Nothing of that sort appears here, and no version of it published on a historical record would be reliable for long enough to be worth publishing. A reader who wants to visit somewhere should get their information from whoever runs the place.

Reading the older material correctly

Three pages carry most of the weight of the historical account. The park profile describes what stood at the old site. The cub petting page covers the practice the park became known for and later announced it would end. The volunteering page deals with the programme that brought paying international participants to hand-raise cubs.

For the surrounding geography, including where the old site sat in relation to the reserve country north-west of the city, the Johannesburg safari page is the orientation. It also explains why a predator park on that particular road drew the traffic it did.