Sickening – Canned hunting: the lions bred for slaughter

Canned hunting is a fast-growing business in South Africa, where thousands of lions are being bred on farms to be shot by wealthy foreign trophy-hunters.

It’s sickening.

The easy slaughter of animals in fenced areas is called “canned hunting“, perhaps because it’s rather like shooting fish in a barrel. A fully-grown, captive-bred lion is taken from its pen to an enclosed area where it wanders listlessly for some hours before being shot dead by a man with a shotgun, hand-gun or even a crossbow, standing safely on the back of a truck. He pays anything from £5,000 to £25,000, and it is all completely legal.

Click here to read Patrick Barkham’s in the The Guardian