Sirs,
I am in receipt of a press statement of 14 February 2008 issued jointly by Antelope Park, ALERT, and a Sir Ranulph Fiennes in response to the Sunday Times article by Chris Haslam "African lion encounters: a bloody con," published on February 10, 2008.
The press statement attempts to deal with what I consider are two essential points: 1) that ALERT exported 37 lion to South African captive centres and that there was no intention to sell them to a canned hunting operation. This is naïve or disingenuous in the extreme given the many conservation bandits at work in the semi-autonomous nine provinces of South Africa. And to state that "there was a pre-condition on the provision of an export permit by the Zimbabwe Wildlife Authority that those lions could not be used for canned hunting" shows a degree of respect for the Zimbabwean Government and its powers which is touching.
The other crucial issue which got us all huffing and puffing in the first place in Zambia is 2) the question of what will happen to the lion once they tire of being cuddled and strolled about with. ALERT'S statement denies that tourists and volunteers are told that the lion cubs are being raised for release in the wild, or that "this form of release has never formed part of the release programme ", yet concluding the paragraph by saying "they will therefore be able to be released into the wild with the same avoidance behaviours towards humans as any wild born lion." This is all very confusing and clearly contradictory.
Read the complete post at http://www.memeza.com/story.php?title=Lion_walking_and_canned_hunting
Posted
Feb 26 2008, 01:35 PM
by
memeza / Zambian News