The Lion: King of the Jungle, the Big Beast, star of the Lion King, one of the world’s best known and best-loved animals – or perhaps more accurately a wild cat of the open plains whose population, according to a 2015 statement by the IUCN, has declined approximately 42% over the past 21 years, and the unwitting star of the chilling 2015 documentary ‘Blood Lions‘, which uncovered the realities of the multi-million dollar predator breeding and canned lion hunting industries in South Africa. From magnificent predators we have turned Lions into inbred animals farmed in miserable conditions across southern Africa, animals rented out to be cuddled by so-called ‘voluntourists’ then sold on to be shot in their enclosures by trophy hunters in canned hunts, animals whose bones are boiled down to service the demands of traditional Chinese medicine now that Tigers have been exploited to the point of extinction.

Charlie Moores met up with conservationist, activist, author and filmmaker Richard Peirce to discuss the impact of ‘Blood Lions’ and his own excellent 2018 book ‘Cuddle Me, Kill Me‘, a scathing and in-depth investigation of South Africa’s large-scale captive lion breeding industry, from, as the book puts it, bottle to bullet. Richard is now deep into the making of an investigative documentary, ‘Lions, Bones, and Bullets‘.

“…when we were researching there were somewhere between 12,000 – 14,000 lions in captivity…there are maybe as few as 14,000 in the wild across Africa…the captive population may be overtaking the wild popuation…to be farming lions like that, it’s repulsive…”

Richard Peirce | Lions, Bones, and Bullets
June 2019

• This podcast was originally posted on Lush Player on June 2019