Four lions rescued from hellish conditions in captivity in the Ukraine have arrived at the Kragga Kamma Game Park in Port Elizabeth.
The big cats were flown into Port Elizabeth on Wednesday evening and trucked out to the park.
They spent the night in a protective night house before being released into their spacious new home – a 1,500m² enclosure with two berms, aloes and other indigenous vegetation, boulders and a waterhole – on Thursday.
“They’ve been used to a much smaller space so we felt they needed the night house to transition from, and to retreat to, if need be,” park co-owner Ayesha Cantor said.
“When the young male came out this morning, he just dived into the grass and sand.
“The three females all explored a bit, but in the late morning after eating they went back inside the night house.
“I think the change in their environment has been so mind-boggling that, for now, they feel more secure there.”
The lions were rescued by Lionel de Lange, director of the Ukrainian branch of the Lawrence Anthony Earth Organisation, and translocated to the Kragga Kamma Game Park thanks to an old Port Elizabeth school tie.
De Lange was at Westering High School with Cantor’s husband Mike and, when he was trying to work out how to get his rescued lions back to their African roots, he remembered that Mike and his family owned the park.
He phoned his old connection and, after several months of negotiation and discussion, it was agreed that the lions would be relocated there.
De Lange came across the lions a year ago during his main work of rescuing brown bears, which are sometimes held as tourist attractions in the Ukraine and for the illegal sport of dog-baiting.
The lionesses were being kept in a 35m² pit filled with their faeces and urine on a farm in Sambir south of Libov.
The farmer had got them from a circus that had come to town and his idea was to start a private zoo.
De Lange managed to accomplish his mission of rescuing three bears, but he could not forget the lions he had been forced to leave behind.
He contacted the farmer again and found that one lioness had died.
He convinced the farmer to hand over the remaining three cats and relocated them to a temporary enclosure.
During a separate case he found a male lion cub being held by a former circus wild animal trainer and breeder in Khmelnytskyi, west of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.
It was in a concrete-andiron cage about 15m² with no sunlight.
The Ukrainian authorities were alerted and, after the owner was compelled to get rid of his animals, De Lange stepped in to relocate the cub to a temporary enclosure next to the lionesses.
Cantor said the lions’ threeday journey started with a 12hour truck drive to Kiev and ended with a five-star flight from Rand Airport in Johannesburg, where they were tranquillised and laid out in the passenger section of a plane.
Though there is no chance of rewilding them, there will be no petting and no human contact during feeding times.
The lionesses will be sterilised soon, but it is hoped that they and the young male will bond, Cantor said.
“Our intention is to give them as wild an experience as possible,” she said.
“They may be a little shy to start off with, but viewing for visitors should get better as time passes.”