These lion carcasses, as well as the ones she had seen the previous day, were being processed into skeletons to be sold to wildlife product dealers in Asia. “Overseas buyers don’t want a skull with a bullet in it,” he told her, which is why he didn’t shoot them directly in the cranium.

As they lapsed into unconsciousness, he walked from one to the next, methodically shooting each in the ear with a. A veterinarian arrived at 9 a.m., drove into the newly arrived lions’ corral in a pickup truck, and, as Meyer watched, darted all 28 with tranquilizers. She returned to Wag ‘n Bietjie the next morning to observe that animal welfare standards were being maintained on the farm. Meyer insisted that the lions be released into a corral rather than be left in their transport crates overnight, as the farm manager had planned to do. That afternoon a truck arrived with 28 additional lions, which were to be killed the next day.

“You could see that it wasn’t the first time they’d done this,” she says. Inside she found a supervisor and about eight workers stripping the skin and flesh from the fresh carcasses of 26 lions, expertly reducing them to clean skeletons. She then noticed a large pile of rotting, fly-covered meat outside a farm shed. She went to the farm, found the lions, and discovered that they’d been trucked about 250 miles in the crates from Predators Pride, a “safari park” near Johannesburg that keeps big cats in small enclosures so tourists can get close to them and, for an extra fee, hold lion cubs or cuddle adult cheetahs while having their photos taken. In April, she received a tip: Two adult lions had been held for two days without food or water in tiny transport crates on a farm called Wag ‘n Bietjie (“Wait a While” in Afrikaans) about 20 miles outside the city. Reinet Meyer is the senior inspector at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the provincial city of Bloemfontein, located in the central grasslands of South Africa.

Captive market game scenes