PHASA’S STAND ON CAPTIVE-BRED LIONS HAILED BY INTERNATIONAL HUNTING COMMUNITY

Pretoria, 25 January 2016 - The Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa (PHASA) says it has received support and encouragement from all sectors of the global hunting community for its stance against captive-bred lion hunting.

The association’s president, Stan Burger, who has just returned from the annual convention of the Dallas Safari Club in the USA, says PHASA’s international peer organisations as well as many of its members’ clients had expressed their relief that PHASA had distanced itself from a practice which a great majority of hunters regard as an embarrassment.

Burger said it was regrettable that the sole exception was the South African Predator Association (SAPA), which represents the lion breeding and hunting industry. Instead of joining the worldwide move to reform this industry, he said, SAPA was trying to preserve its captive bred hunting component, and in the process was substantially misrepresenting PHASA’s position as well as its own.

“PHASA tried to work with SAPA for a number of years in an attempt to introduce generally acceptable standards for lion breeding and hunting, and it was only when it became clear that this attempt would continue to fail in the face of SAPA’s persistent recalcitrance that we dissociated ourselves from them,” he said.

“In a public statement, SAPA has now claimed that PHASA ‘buckled before (an) onslaught of uninformed social activists.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. In arriving at our carefully considered decision, we were guided by the views of major industry role players, including the main hunting industry bodies as well as our own members. They were all of the opinion that captive bred lion hunting was not only ethically repugnant but posed a real threat to the future of the entire trophy hunting industry.

“In its statement SAPA also claims that it ‘is very much aware of and seriously committed towards conservation of lions in the wild.’ What it does not say, however, is that in 2014 – the most recent year for which statistics are available - lion hunting in South Africa generated a revenue of close to R200 million, while SAPA’s conservation fund only managed to raise R200 000, or 0.1% of that total. This hardly suggests an energetic conservation commitment. In addition, it seeks to equate its members with buffalo and rhino owners when, of course, there is no comparison.”

Burger notes that SAPA also boasts of the fact that 12 privately owned lion hunting farms have been accredited, by its own standards, as having “dedicated their businesses to the legal and authentic hunting of captive bred lions in South Africa.” What it does not mention, Burger says, is that there are more than 200 of these farms in the country, and the so-called accredited ones therefore represent a small fraction of the whole.

“SAPA describes captive-bred lion hunting as ‘an important node of resistance against the opponents of all forms of hunting.’ In PHASA’s view, and that of the great majority of professional hunters and their clients, this practice is in fact the industry’s Achilles heel. We therefore hope that SAPA will come to realise that the long term sustainability of the industry is more important than the short term profits of its members,” he said.