Movie Thoughts: Blood Lions (2015)

• Released: 22 July 2015
  
• Directed by: Nick Chevallier, Bruce Young
• Running time: 1 h 24 min
• Rating 4/5

Synopsis

A documentary on the practice of canned hunting, particularly surrounding lions.

My Thoughts

For those not in the know, canned hunting is a form of hunting where the animal being hunted is in one way or another limited in their escaping possibilities. Usually there'll be a fence surrounding the land, but they can also be (additionally) drugged to be slower or just generally be used to a human's presence. 

Canned hunting facilities, in this case in certain African countries, often parade themselves as lion sanctuaries or rescues, however in reality they are just breeding lions for the sake of being killed by rich people who pay them, following by the lion being used as a trophy or sometimes traditional medicine. They're basically just lion farms.

The documentary does a very good job on illustrating how dark things really get. Nick Chevallier takes us on a journey to various of these "sanctuaries" and illustrates what aspects are shady, whereas Bruce Young goes through the process of trying out a canned hunt himself (with the intention of him never actually shooting the lion, just figuring out how things work). Of course, they're met by a lot of angry lion farmers and people telling them to get off their property. The directors give a lot of info about how things are done on these farms and how you can tell the difference between a farm and a sanctuary.

The documentary doesn't shy away from showing the darker stuff. You do see footage of lions being shot and the bodies thereafter. It's not pretty. But it does pay a very clear picture of what we're dealing with. These lions are bred for no other purpose than to be killed later in life. They are also kept in inhumane conditions, with way too many in one pen and cubs being separated from their mothers when they're sometimes not even a week old. The cubs are accustomed to humans and some "sanctuaries" even allow tourists to pay for cuddling one of these cubs or walking with some adult lions. These are clear signs of something being a canned hunting farm and not a legit sanctuary. Accredited sanctuaries allow as little lion-human contact as possible and do not breed lions.

We're also shown scenes of a hunting convention where various participants in canned hunting tell their POVs, and it's of course every bit as ridiculous as you'd expect. They argue that they're somehow protecting lions by killing them this way. Look, I get that they're technically not taking any lions from the wild, so that's something, but that doesn't mean that this way of hunting is okay, either. These lions live in bad conditions up until the day they're killed just to be another trophy. That's not exactly ethical, either. Just because a wild lion wasn't killed that doesn't mean this is any less fucked up. 

The hunter's whole argument of "we're actually increasing the number of lions this way, so that's contributing to rescues as well" also just falls flat. These lions aren't raised in a reserve, by their own kind. They're tame. They are human-reared. They don't know how to survive in the wild. Releasing any of these farmed lions will just result in the animal dying a slow death or possibly with them posing a threat to humans due to being habituated to them, resulting in them dying by shotgun anyways. So no, canned hunting isn't more "noble" than hunting a wild lion. 

The part with Young commissioning his own canned hunt goes astray as the lion farmers realize he's a "greenie" and (as planned) he doesn't get to shoot his designated lioness. After this they actually tried to get the lioness relocated to a legit sanctuary instead to make things at least better for this individual, but unfortunately those plans fell through, with her fate being unknown. Bummer ending.

Overall this is a great but very dark documentary on the fucked up practice of canned hunting. Don't get me wrong, I'm not 100% anti-hunting. I think that, in certain cases if it's an animal that isn't endangered or protected and isn't killed in the canned hunting way, it's okay. Especially if a lot of parts of the animal end up being used so it didn't die in vain. I mean, I eat meat, so I feel like it'd be hypocritical of me to be 100% against hunting. But at the same time there's lines we gotta draw. And I think canned hunting is way past crossing that line.