You might think that all lions are, by definition, wild animals. Increasingly however that’s not the case. In fact, wild lions – animals that’ve had little or no contact with humans and so behave entirely naturally around them – are now in a minority in South Africa. There are currently around 2,750 wild lions, like the ones in Addo National Park, in the country, but there are reckoned to be more than twice that number – between 6,000 and 8,000 animals – who’ve been bred and are kept in captivity.

It gets worse though. “Some of the canned hunting is even more sinister,” Craig continues. “[Sometimes] you have a bit of an enclosure to shoot this thing, but some are even more sinister – guys will literally walk up to a caged pen, like a kennel, put a rifle through and shoot an animal on the other side. It’s horrific stuff.”

Warren Manser, another ranger I spoke to, agrees: “Canned hunting is not a challenge. It’s basically a drugged lion, in an enclosure, you walk in and shoot it and walk out again.” But if this horrifically efficient, production line approach is ethically reprehensible, it is also excellent business. Hunters will pay more (“easily 1 million rand [£50,000]”, according to Warren,) to shoot a wild lion, but the margins on captive-bred creatures are usually better. At a game auction, Manser tells me, “you can pick up a lion cheap, for about 30,000 rand (£1,500)”. Trophy hunters who aren’t fussy about shooting a captive-bred creature will pay anything up to £25,000 to kill one.

Internationally, the film was given a huge boost when the killing of Cecil the Lion threw a spotlight on trophy hunting. “We released [Blood Lions] on the 22nd of July last year and I think it was about two days later that the news of Cecil’s shooting in Zimbabwe broke,” Bruce says. Cecil’s death – and the public outcry – meant the hunting industry as a whole was suddenly headline news. So a film about one of its nastier aspects was bound to resonate.

Certainly the scenes in the film make for pretty shocking viewing. It’s not just the footage of lions being shot in enclosed spaces either. The documentary makes clear that the actual death of a canned lion is just one stage in an exploitative cycle. Bruce explains: “There are five elements to this exploitation of lions that happens. First is the intensive breeding.” Blood Lions includes heart-wrenching footage of lion cubs being taken away from their mothers at a few weeks old, caged separately and fed by hand. This has the dual effect of getting the cubs accustomed to humans at an early age and allowing the lioness to become fertile again so she can breed more frequently than she would in the wild.

Bruce continues: “Second, there’s the cub petting, which is a big part of South African tourism.” People flock from around the world to cuddle, feed and pet lion cubs, often in the mistaken belief that they have been orphaned. In fact they’ve frequently just been taken from their mother too early so that she will can breed again. “Everyone wants to pet a lion cub, everyone wants to play with a lion cub, they want a photograph of themselves on Facebook with a lion cub, and the wool is pulled over their eyes,” Karen Trendler, a wildlife rehabilitation specialist, tells the filmmakers.

Blood Lions also includes interviews with several young “voluntourists” – gap year kids from Europe and elsewhere who have paid to come and work on so-called sanctuaries in the belief that they are helping the conservation effort. “For 30 days, I paid US$2,800 (£2,100),” says ‘Alexa’ a young French Canadian who spoke to Bruce and his team. Warren Manser tells Mpora: “The thing is the word sanctuary is used very, very vaguely. It’s a tourist attraction, so people can go and visit them and make themselves feel good, and they use the word ‘sanctuary’ to make it sound good.”

The next stage is the canned hunt itself. Of course many of the breeding operations that call themselves sanctuaries claim to be horrified at the suggestion that the lions they raise might go on to be shot. But Bruce and his team believe this is – at best – wilful ignorance on the part of the owners. “They deny it,” he says. “On camera they deny it and in any public forum. They say: ‘We, as a breeder, do not sell to any hunting operation.’ But of course there are middlemen who buy lions, who have no connection to a hunting operation themselves, but then they sell them on.”

Once a lion has been hunted (or rather released into a small enclosure for a short period of time and possibly drugged before being gunned down) its head and skin are removed to become the hunter’s grisly trophies. But there is still more money to be made from the carcass. “The fifth exploitative element [of a canned lion’s life cycle] is the lion bone trade,” Bruce explains. The selling of lion bones for traditional Chinese medicine.

A 2009 article by conservation campaigner Ian Michler, who appears in Blood Lions and was an integral part of the team, asserts that: “The price of lion bones has leapt […] to more than US$300 (£225) per kilogram.” He concludes that “at present prices, the bones of a lioness are worth more than the average asking price to shoot one – around $4,000 (£3,000).”

Of course the operations that breed lions are not always the same as those that offer hunting, just as those which offer hunting don’t always offer taxidermy services, or sell bones. But there are outfits that seek to squeeze a profit out of more than one aspect of the lion’s life cycle. One such operation is Benkoe Safaris, which features heavily in the documentary. “His whole operation is on the same property,” says Bruce. “He just moves the lion from the breeding camps over to a slightly bigger area of bush and tells the hunters: ‘This is not a tame lion, this is a wild lion’.”

In order to gain access to the property, Bruce enlisted the help of Rick Swazey, an American who posed as a would-be canned hunter. The crew’s intentions were eventually rumbled, a scene which they caught dramatically on camera. “I think our camera equipment – and in particular the sound equipment – looked that bit more professional than some of the video crews [that usually accompany hunters]. And the big fat farmer who threatened us, he had been the target of one or two previous exposés, so he was a bit suspicious,” explains Bruce. But the fact that the Rick was there with them in the first place cuts to the core of what is wrong with canned hunting.

Although it undoubtedly ups the drama of the film, getting a hunter like Rick onside wasn’t just good for the movie, Bruce explains, it’s also good for the broader campaign against canned hunting. “I learned a lot from Ian [Michler],” says Bruce. “With his long experience of meeting and dealing with many of these people, the only way to achieve any traction and affect any change is by holding the middle ground in the whole debate.” By taking this approach, he explains, “we’ve been able to engage with the hunting community who don’t want to be seen to be supporting something like a canned hunt where it’s really a tame lion that has just been popped off”.

It’s an approach that’s worked too – at least when it comes to getting hunters’ attention. “To his credit, the president of the Professional Hunter’s Association [of South Africa] came to see our film at the festival two days after the premiere. We chatted to him afterwards and within 24 hours he put out a statement. It didn’t mention the film, but said the practise of canned hunting needed to be addressed within the hunting community of South Africa, and that they will address it at their next AGM.”

There’s a financial incentive for the wider industry to act too. Blood Lions’ exposure of canned hunting practises has fed into a backlash against hunting as a whole. Many airlines now refuse to carry hunting trophies and in December last year the importing of lion body parts was banned in the US – the world’s largest hunting market. These moves have hit the entire hunting industry hard.

Which begs the question – if even hunters are against canned hunting, then how is it still happening? The official line from the Department of Environmental Affairs, the ministry responsible for regulating hunting, is that “canned hunting is illegal in South Africa”. However campaigners believe this doesn’t explain the full picture, as the definition of exactly what constitutes canned hunting is vague.

Bruce says “they are weaselling and dodging the issue and using semantics to justify their answer.” Ian Michler agrees: “To get away from the stigma that the phrase ‘canned hunting’ had, the breeders, hunters and the government redefined canned hunting.” So while drugging or baiting a lion are now technically illegal, shooting a tame, captive-bred lion that’s been hand-reared and trusts humans in a small enclosure is not.

“If even hunters are against canned hunting, then how is it still happening?”

These debated definitions make it harder to separate what Craig Duffield refers to as “quote unquote ‘ethical’ hunting” operations from the ones who are playing hard and fast with the rules. In fact the definitions are so vague that even the South Africa Predator Association (SAPA), which represents breeders, can claim to be against ‘canned hunting’ – at least according to their narrow definition of the term.

The problem isn’t just that the laws aren’t watertight either, it’s that they’re not being enforced effectively. The statement from the Department for Environmental Affairs concedes that there are “rogue elements […] operating within the lion breeding and hunting industries, and that these need to be rooted out.” But questionable practises are hard to police out in the bush, and according to campaigners unscrupulous operators continue to bend the rules. Bruce says: “The official line is that all hunting in South Africa is carefully controlled and permitted, it is patently evident that the ‘control and permitting’ is not happening”.

South Africa’s government-administered National Parks, which are “globally recognised for [their] conservation successes” might be one such environment. In contrast, Bruce says of the current lion breeders: “They’re just farmers. Farmers are businessmen. They’ve seen an opportunity to make a buck and they’re doing it. If they were not allowed to breed then, it would take time but they’d find another product to farm.”

Craig Duffield agrees: “I don’t think any place should be having lions that people are going to be playing with and cuddling,” he says. Nature he believes, should be left to its own devices as far as possible. It is, of course the fact that lions are wild creatures – not domesticated animals – that makes them such a draw for tourists. It’s this that left my group open-mouthed in Addo and it’s this that brings millions of other tourists like us to South Africa each year. Ironically, it’s this same wild beauty that makes lions so appealing to hunters.

But by breeding these creatures, by farming them like cattle and by killing them like cattle, the canned hunting industry is stripping them of their wildness. It’s removing the very thing that makes them so special in the first place, reducing the the king of beasts to the status of a battery hen. For anyone who has a genuine interest in the wild, including hunters, that can only be a bad thing.

You can find out more about the campaign against canned hunting and download Blood Lions at bloodlions.org. Get involved by attending or organising a screening and petitioning to have canned hunting stopped.

As a general rule, the Blood Lions team urge tourists and volunteers not to visit farms that offer cub petting or walking with lions. The Campaign Against Canned Hunting (a separate organisation) has excellent advice on ethical volunteering and ethical tourism on its website.

To read the rest of Mpora’s June ‘Wild Issue’ head here

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