South Africa is an extremely popular travel destination. With its beautiful landscapes and amazing wildlife, it attracts all types of travelers. From nature lovers wanting a safari through Kruger National Park to hunters wanting to see wildlife for a different reason.
Many international hunters travel to the region to participate in «trophy hunting,» where hunters bring home dead animals as trophies to hang on their walls or display on their shelves as souvenirs. Virtually all game species are available for trophy hunting – even endangered species such as lions and elephants – it’s just a matter of money.
South Africa is home to almost 300 species of wild mammals, including the ‘Big 5’ – lion, leopard, elephant, black rhino and cape buffalo – and has an uncanny captive wildlife industry.
From 2008 to 2018, South Africa exported an average of over 1000 hunting trophies annually, with most of the trophies coming from captive bred lions. Captive breeding also allows hunters to hunt rarities such as white lions and white tigers, which are more valuable and are in high demand by trophy hunters. The five most important countries to which South Africa says it exports are the USA, Spain, Russia, Canada and China.
The breeding industry uses animals like lions as a pet attraction for tourists under the pretense that it is a matter of sustainable conservation. Later these are used as easy targets for gate hunting, or they are killed and their parts and derivatives sold, mainly for «Traditional Medicine» uses in Asia.
In 1997, the Cook Report, a British television investigative documentary series, uncovered the South African lion breeding industry and introduced the term «gate hunting». The term is used for commercial hunting of captive bred big cats that have lost their fear of humans. The animals are hunted in fenced and gated pens on private hunting farms where they have little to no chance of escape.
Gate hunting increases the chance of successfully bagging the trophy animal in the shortest amount of time and is particularly popular with the more inexperienced hunters. In some cases, big cats are stunned to make it even easier for the hunter to hit the target.
Proponents of this style of trophy hunting often use terms like «ranch hunting,» «captive hunting,» or «put and take hunting» in place of the corrupted term of gate hunting. However, this is all just semantics as they all describe the same type of trophy hunting which is not a «fair hunt».