What is walking with lions?

It is a paid activity in which a small group of visitors walks on foot alongside one or two hand-raised sub-adult lions, accompanied by handlers, on a track through open ground. The walk usually lasts under an hour and follows fixed rules about posture and position.

Are the lions used for walking tame?

They are habituated, not tame. Hand-rearing removes the animal's fear of people, which makes the encounter possible, but it does not remove the animal's capabilities. That is why handlers, group limits and posture rules are part of every operation offering it.

How old are the lions used for lion walks?

Sub-adult. They are past the age at which they can be handled in a petting enclosure and not yet at the size where walking beside tourists is impossible. The usable window is short, which is why the activity depends on a continuous supply of new animals.

Why do conservation groups object to walking with lions?

Because of what surrounds it. The activity requires captive breeding on a continuous basis, and produces grown lions that cannot be released and cannot all be kept. Groups describe the encounters as one stage in a sequence whose other end includes enclosed trophy hunting and the lion bone trade.

Can lions used for walking be released into the wild?

No. An animal raised on a bottle and walked with tourists has neither the hunting behaviour nor the wariness of people that survival would require, and releasing a lion with no fear of humans creates an obvious hazard.

Is walking with lions still offered in South Africa?

It has not been prohibited, and it continued after some parks stopped offering cub handling. National policy on captive lion breeding has since moved against the industry that supplies the animals, which changes the position of the activity without directly regulating it.

Walking with lions in South Africa: what it involves and the criticism

Walking with lions sells a short window in a captive animal's life: old enough to be interesting, young enough to be manageable. Conservation groups treat it as the middle section of the same chain that begins in a petting enclosure.

Of the three tourist encounters that South African predator facilities have built businesses on, walking with lions is the least examined. Cub handling is easy to picture and easy to argue about. Enclosed trophy hunting produces photographs that make the case against themselves. The lion walk sits between them and looks, to a visitor, like the most defensible of the three.

What walking with lions involves

The format is consistent across operators. A small group of visitors goes out on foot with one or two lions and a set of handlers, on a marked track through open bush. Handlers carry sticks. There are rules, usually the same rules everywhere: stay upright, do not crouch, do not run, do not walk behind the animal, keep the group together. The walk lasts under an hour. Photographs are part of the product and are often sold separately.

The animals are hand-raised. That is not incidental to the activity, it is the precondition for it. A lion that has been bottle-fed by people since infancy will tolerate the proximity of a group of strangers in a way no wild-born animal would, and the entire encounter depends on that tolerance holding for the length of the walk.

What is sold alongside the walk matters as much as the walk. A venue offering it will generally also offer cub handling, feeding demonstrations and photographs, and the lion walk is presented as the premium item in that set. It is the encounter a visitor remembers, and the one that gets described at length afterwards.

Where walking with lions sits in a captive lion's life

The activity uses a narrow age band. Below it, the animal is small enough for cub petting, which is a more lucrative use of the same lion because it needs no space and no track. Above it, the animal is simply too strong. A fully grown lion cannot be walked next to tourists under any set of rules, which means every animal used for lion walking passes out of the activity within a matter of months.

That is the fact the criticism turns on. The walk is not a life stage that an animal can occupy indefinitely. It is a stage that ends, and something has to happen next.

Why conservation groups treat it as part of the same chain

The argument runs the same way as the one made about petting enclosures. A facility offering lion walks needs a supply of sub-adult animals, which requires breeding on a continuous basis, which produces more grown lions than any walking operation can keep. Conservation organisations describe the result as a progression: cubs bred for handling are later walked with tourists, and animals leaving that system can end up in enclosed hunts or in the trade in lion bones.

The documentary Blood Lions put that sequence in front of a general audience in 2015, and the walking stage is the part of it that visitors most often defend, because it looks like exercise and enrichment instead of exploitation. The counter-argument does not dispute that the animals are walked. It disputes what the walking is for.

The safety question

Habituation is not tameness. A hand-raised lion is an unafraid lion, which is a different and in some ways more dangerous animal than a wary one. Operators manage the risk by using young animals, by keeping numbers small, by employing experienced handlers and by imposing the posture rules that make a visitor look less like prey. The rules exist because the risk is real, not because it is theoretical.

The risk also does not stay confined to the activity that produces it. A predator facility that habituates lions to people is holding animals with no natural caution about human beings, and the consequences of that have been reported at South African parks in circumstances that had nothing to do with a walk.

What operators say

The defence offered by operators has three parts. The animals get exercise and stimulation they would not get in an enclosure. Visitors who have been close to a lion care more about lions afterwards, and some of that care turns into donations and into political support for wild populations. And the revenue keeps facilities running that would otherwise have fewer options for the animals already in their care.

The first of those is hard to dispute for the individual animal on the individual day. The second is asserted much more often than it is measured. The third is the one critics find most revealing, because it treats an animal population created by deliberate breeding as an inherited obligation.

Volunteers and the walking stage

Paying international volunteers were a standard part of the labour arrangement at facilities offering these encounters. Volunteers raised the cubs, and in many programmes they also accompanied the older animals on walks. The volunteer programme at the Lion Park is among the better-documented examples, and volunteer placement agencies were an early target of the campaigning that followed Blood Lions. Oyster.com, which reviews placements, listed the park among the most controversial animal attractions in five languages.

Where the practice stands

Walking with lions has not been banned in South Africa, and it continued to be offered after individual parks withdrew from cub handling. What has changed is the surrounding policy. A national review of the captive predator sector recommended ending captive lion breeding for hunting and for the bone trade, and an industry that cannot breed for those markets is a different industry from the one that built the walking product in the first place.

The activity has also outlived the words used to sell it. Encounters advertised as lion walks, lion encounters or predator walks are the same product under different labels, and the relabelling has tended to follow criticism rather than any change in what happens on the track.

How that resolves for the animals currently in the system is an open question, and one that the operators, the campaigners and the department responsible for it answer differently.