11/08/2025
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🦁 WORLD LION DAY, 10 AUGUST 2025
Yesterday, 10 August 2025 marked - a day in which we celebrate and honour the majesty of lions - and reaffirm our fight to protect them from cruelty, commodification, and exploitation.
Animal Law Reform South Africa (ALRSA), together with our partners and alliances, have long called for an end to the harmful commercial lion industries – including lion farming, the lion bone trade, commercial captive breeding of lions and trophy hunting, among others.
For example, through our submissions on the Draft Notice Prohibiting Certain Activities Involving African Lion (2023 & 2024) (“Lion Prohibition Notice”), Non-Detriment Findings, CITES consultations, and broader policy processes such as the Draft White Paper on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of South Africa’s Biodiversity and the Draft National Biodiversity Economy Strategy, among others, we have:
🦁 Advocated for a total prohibition on all forms of lion farming
🦁 Exposed loopholes and exceptions that could allow exploitation of lions to continue
🦁 Urged that animal well-being, sentience, and intrinsic value of lions be explicitly and meaningfully embedded in law and policy
Learn more about our work here: https://www.animallawreform.org/our-work/
ALRSA also serves on all eight task teams of the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment’s Wildlife Well-being Forum - including the Captive Breeding and Predators Task Teams - with our Executive Director, chairing the Legal and Policy Task Team. Across these platforms, we work to ensure that the well-being and interests of individual animals are central to all decisions and actions affecting them.
We welcome recent developments from the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Dr Dion George (https://www.gov.za/news/media-statements/minister-dion-george-takes-action-ban-captive-lion-breeding-facilities-15-jul), who confirmed that the Department is making rapid progress toward publishing the Lion Prohibition Notice, which will ban the establishment of new captive lion breeding facilities in South Africa. This is a key step in phasing out harmful intensive breeding practices for commercial purposes and strengthening protections under the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act.
While this is a significant step forward, ALRSA believes the Lion Prohibition Notice falls short in a few ways – for example – it should also apply to existing facilities, with careful measures to ensure the protection of all lions currently in captivity and to prevent loopholes that could allow the industry to continue under another guise.
All of these efforts however, reflects a growing recognition – at policy, legal, and public levels – that lions are NOT commodities. They are sentient beings with intrinsic value as individuals, who deserve to flourish in their natural habitats.
