“Leon went in to fix the fence but knows the lions well and turned his back as he was fixing the fence and one came from behind and took his neck. There was nothing anyone could have done to save him…”
So it was Leon’s fault and his error cost the lives of all the lions in the enclosure?
Animal advocates will be and are distraught at the killing of the lions in this enclosure due to a person’s carelessness. Below is an example of a comment on Facebook.
“Cheryl Knight Lockhart: Those animals should not have been shot to death! He was wrong to keep them captive. Who ever killed the lions I hope you go to jail for a long time!”
South Africa: A person known as ‘Lion Man’ (Leon van Biljon) was killed by the lions he loved when one of them bit his neck inside the Mahala View Lion Game Lodge at Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria, South Africa.
The man was fixing a fence inside the enclosure when he was attacked. A bite to the man’s neck killed him it seems. He was then surrounded by lions. They shot the lions to get at the dead man.
The question for me and millions of animal advocates is why didn’t they tranquillise the lions or do something else to get them away from the man?
Perhaps they thought that the urgency of the situation demanded that they shot the lions. It appears that they had decided that if they’d had tranquillised them it would have taken time for it to act and they wanted to get to the man as quickly as possible. But there may have been other methods to clear the lions away.
In any case there should have been in place methods and policies to deal with this sort of situation without recourse to killing the lions. Where was the policy and training to deal with lions under these circumstances humanely and decently?
In a strict sense it was the man’s fault. The lions were blameless. It seems completely unfair and morally wrong to kill animals who have been captive against their wishes and them shot dead when acting normally.
All the bad issues surrounding this matter are human generated. It is another example of near totally failure of human interaction with wild animals.
