Youth for Lions – a groundbreaking NPO

The Blood Lions international award-winning documentary film and global campaign exposes the commercial captive lion breeding and keeping industry in South Africa, including the exploitation of lions used for interactive activities in captive wildlife tourism such as cub petting, walking with lions, and voluntourism, canned hunting, live trade and trade in bones and body parts. These unethical and insidious practices form part of the life cycle of a lion in the commercial captive predator breeding industry in South Africa. The Blood Lions story is a compelling call to action to not be part of the problem, to have these practices stopped and the industry closed down. To achieve this objective, Blood Lions undertakes public engagement through awareness raising and education on the above issues, carries out research and writes peer-reviewed papers to fill knowledge gaps, and fulfills a lobbying and policy advocacy role.

Youth For Lions is a vibrant, young sub-campaign of Blood Lions. We aim to educate young people about these exploitative industries. We also want to engage with young people about how cub petting, walking with predators, and volunteering at predator farms is enabling and contributing to the wider captive predator breeding industry in South Africa.

Our current projects are :

Blood Lions and Youth For Lions are both running global campaigns to educate the public and raise awareness regarding the exploitative nature of the commercial captive lion industry, including cub petting, lion walking, canned hunting, and the bone trade
Blood Lions team members have published several peer-reviewed papers covering issues such as welfare concerns, predator attacks on people, provincial and national legislation, and zoonotic illnesses in captive lion populations.