Poor Welfare Indicators and Husbandry Practices at Lion (Panthera Leo) “Cub-Petting” Facilities: Evidence from Public YouTube Videos

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The present study documents animal welfare concerns associated with a popular form of wildlife tourism: lion cub “petting”. With data collected from 49 publicly available videos uploaded by tourists in South Africa, we find that lion cubs in these facilities regularly exhibit stress behaviors, including stereotypies, during tourist interactions. Video analysis shows that cubs in these facilities are subjected to several forms of poor husbandry practices such as being forced to interact outside normal waking hours. These results also suggest that regardless of tourism type—pure entertainment (tourism) or educational or pseudo-training opportunities in animal husbandry for volunteers (voluntourism)—“cub-petting” facilities involve acute negative welfare impacts in addition to the broader harms of normalizing the touching of young lions and perpetuating captive breeding. ABSTRACT: There is growing concern about captive lion hunting and breeding operations in South Africa, including cub-petting tourism. For the first time, we assess the quality of cub-petting facilities and code the stress behaviors of lion cubs when handled by tourists by analyzing four stress-related behaviors and six indicators of poor husbandry in 49 YouTube videos of tourist–lion cub interactions (from at least 11 South African safari parks, 2008-2019). We also categorized videos as regular tourism vs. voluntourism (tourism under the guise of helping those in need). We found a median of four poor husbandry practices per video, with all but two videos involving very young cubs (under 7 months) and the majority (61%) involving cubs estimated under 3 months old. Two videos claimed to show cubs as young as 9 days old and 1 day old, with their eyes still closed. The lion mother was apparent in only 1 of 49 videos. All but one of the interactions took place during the day, although young cubs are primarily active at night. The majority of videos (77%) showed cubs engaging in at least one stress behavior, and the most common stress behaviors were avoidance and aggression. Comparing voluntourism to regular tourism, we found no difference in instances of poor husbandry or observable stress behaviors (p’s > 0.6). These results show that cub-petting operations are characterized by poor cub welfare, including features that are inherently harmful to cub development (e.g., separation from the mother at an early age and forced activity outside normal waking hours). Existing research suggests that many tourists are likely unaware of these negative impacts and may even believe that they are helping the cubs. This analysis provides evidence to the contrary.