Lion Petting Zimbabwe Africa

It’s called Antelope Park. It’s in Zimbabwe and their stated mission is to, ultimately, be able to take lions raised in captivity and eventually release them into their native environment. When we arrived we were given a nice presentation and a video explaining how they were going to do this. So far, the people whose program they’ve adopted have been able to return zero lions to the national parks in Africa in the thirteen years they’ve been trying. But, they’re still working on it and will succeed very soon, I’m sure. In the meantime, tourists like myself get to take really cool pictures like the one you see here. Yes, that is a real lion. It’s about 18 months old. Yes, it really could tear me to shreds. Yes I am scratching it’s back. No, I’m not scared. The handlers walk these lions and others at least once a day. I don’t think they would have ever let me or anyone else scratch the lion’s back if there were going to be problems. At least that’s what I hoped their lawyers had warned them. Note that the largest dimension available for this picture is 1024 X 768 as it was uploaded at a very slow bandwidth from a remote location in Africa.