‘Blood Lions’ documentary exposes cruelty of captive lion hunting

<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<!-- Premiernewsng -->
<ins class="adsbygoogle"
     style="display:block"
     data-ad-client="ca-pub-5847883637156194"
     data-ad-slot="2910581263"
     data-ad-format="auto"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script>

There was worldwide outrage when the public learned that Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer had flown halfway across the world to southern Africa to lure a lion named Cecil out of a national park in Zimbabwe and shoot him with an arrow – just to mount the beloved animal’s head in his living room and get a leg up on his competitors in the macabre universe of globe-trotting international trophy hunting.
It turns out that Palmer’s shameless act is not unique in the world of competitive trophy hunting, and that other wealthy elites travel just as far to shoot the king of beasts – but in hundreds of cases a year, it involves shooting lions in a corral or a pen, in a no-kill-no-pay arrangement.

MSNBC Documentaries, 9/18/15, 8:10 PM ET

Blood Lions Trailer

Tomorrow night, MSNBC airs a must-see documentary, “Blood Lions,” that pulls the curtain back on the shockingly large, unregulated, and appalling South African captive lion hunting industry. Though much of the media following Cecil’s death focused on illegal hunts, “Blood Lions” makes clear that South Africa’s legal lion hunts are perhaps the most cruel and depraved of all. The documentary offers a rare glimpse into the captive, or canned, hunting industry, in which animals are bred in wretched conditions solely to be shot at in hunts with “guaranteed kills” in fenced areas where the animals have no opportunity to escape. If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists African lions as endangered, the disgraceful import of these lion trophies by American hunters should stop, denying the industry a vital class of fee-paying patrons.
The documentary follows a South African safari operator and an American hunter as they expose this sordid industry. The so-called “hunters” who frequent these operations quickly dissolve the myth that this is a sport – they are there solely to gun down the animals and collect their trophies in a transaction where the kill is certain. One trophy hunter interviewed in the documentary says he prefers to kill captive lions because their dead bodies are not as scarred as those of wild lions.
At The Humane Society of the United States, we’ve been fighting the captive hunting industry for decades. We always hear the same excuse from the defenders of this mercenary trade – that captive hunting somehow aids conservation in the wild or supports local communities. “Blood Lions” ably shatters these self-serving myths, demonstrating that the industry hurts wild lion populations and does nothing for local communities – enriching the operators of these facilities and enabling American trophy hunters who have a mania for head-hunting, regardless of the circumstances of their alleged “hunts.”
<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<!-- Premiernewsng -->
<ins class="adsbygoogle"
     style="display:block"
     data-ad-client="ca-pub-5847883637156194"
     data-ad-slot="2910581263"
     data-ad-format="auto"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script>