South Africa - A morning with Panthera Africa (6 September 2025)

After our time in Na’ankuse we were a little bit wary of places claiming to be animal sanctuaries (and didn’t want to go out of our way to support poor ones), and I was still keen to learn more about what a “good” sanctuary would look like. I remember talking to Div about developing some questions or a checklist of information to know beforehand to see if the organisation was everything it claimed to be. However, I really didn’t know where to start on a checklist or what questions would be most effective - as I wrote about after Na’ankuse I realised I needed to build the right mental models to better approach this space. So I had only just had started talking to conversationists and informed people in my network and people we met about it, and a few people mentioned Panthera Africa in those conversations too. (Most of them agreed it was a really difficult to know if it really is a high quality institution before you actually go and meet the people involved and see and feel their work for yourself). Panthera Africa was near enough our planned journey for the Garden Route (it was a short drive from where we were staying in Hermanus), so we booked a morning tour.

As we arrived and checked in we gathered for the briefing under the sign below. This seemed to me to be a great start in developing a way of filtering to find places that were actually prioritising animal welfare.

Everything from the briefing to the way in which our tour was handled and the stories of the individual animals was done with deep love, respect and care for the animals in this sanctuary. We learned so much about the lion/tiger bone trade, big cat breeding farming and the way in which organisations will exploit well intended tourists (and especially voluntourists) to use cheap labour, earn money and feed the shady world of illegal capture, unethical hunting and exploitation. We also met some very impressive animals, each with its own story that left an impact on all of us. Anaya has written a short story based on the true events around Ares, Arabella and Rays which is published on her page. Sia was taken by the story of Jasper and Tammy and we supported/”adopted” them.

The origin story of Panthera Africa itself is a lesson in how deep rooted this issue is (and why it is so hard as a visiting tourist to know what you are directly and indirectly supporting). Founded by two women who had spent most of their career working in a well-known “sanctuary” (hand-raising orphaned lion cubs), only to realise years later that not only were they not really orphans (they had been stolen at birth from their mother in a breeding farm), they were part of a chain of systematic exploitation of animals to generate money from tourism, poaching and organ harvesting. They both left and spent years setting up what they wanted to be a “true” sanctuary, of which today there are only a handful in all of South Africa. (I could now understand why the sign above is featured so prominently as guests enter!). The story of the founders trying to rescue some of the lions they had raised (that had been shipped off to breeding/hunting farms) inspired a book called Cuddle Me, Kill Me in which the journalist author exposes the depth of the underground world beneath many of the most popular tourist attractions involving lions. It seemed a lot of the people who had since come to work at Panthera Africa (it is still only a very small operation today) had a similar story arc - they had come to Africa to work with a sense of mission and purpose to care and protect endangered animals, only to belatedly realise that their motivation was being exploited and they were unknowingly contributing towards an industry of cruelty to the very animals they had wanted to protect. The sad irony is that the organisations that are focused on doing the best work don’t have the budget or inclination for good marketing; whereas those that are optimising for commercial success will know how to tell us what we want to hear and sell itself to customers and employees.

I am so glad we had the opportunity to visit Panthera Africa. It helped me build a better mental model of what to ask, what to look for, and settled some debates in my head about subjective/nuanced issues where I think we just have to draw our own boundary line of what we want to see. For me, I am going to adhere to the principles above (and it is why we avoided some of the most popular places along the Garden Route for animal encounters that we had intended to go on before). It also helped me differentiate between a sanctuary (providing end of life care) and a conservation (trying to protect wild or “managed wild” animals), and some basic fundamentals of what each should be doing. It left a mark on all of us, and we all still remember the stories of the animals months later.