Pakistani authorities say they have confiscated 18 lions kept illegally as pets in Punjab province following a public outcry after an escaped pet lion mauled a woman and two children on a street in Lahore.
The woman suffered scratches and bruises in the attack last week, while two children aged five and seven were hospitalised with non-life-threatening injuries. The owner of the lion was arrested.
Experts say it is a mammoth task to stifle exotic big cat ownership in Pakistan, which has proliferated over the past decade thanks in part to social media.
Declawed and sedated
Punjab's Wildlife and Parks Department says there are 584 lions and tigers in homes and breeding farms across the province.
Hira Jaleel, a visiting assistant professor at the United States Centre for Animal Law Studies, has worked on animal-related legal issues in Pakistan.
Ms Jaleel said illegal wildlife ownership was prolific.
"I have friends who would tell me about how they would be walking their dogs on their street and see lions looking out from people's windows, in the back seats of cars, see people walking their lions like they are dogs," she said.
She said many of the big cats were kept in unsavoury conditions.
"It obviously leads to really poor welfare for these animals, especially when they're being kept in people's backyards, being declawed, perpetually sedated and used as photo ops," she said.
The painful process of declawing — amputating the last digital bone in cubs — is associated with increased biting and aggression but is often undertaken to make pet animals more "harmless".
Even so, because of their large size, lions are sometimes kept drugged to keep them placid.
Status symbols
Some say keeping exotic animals as pets is a trend fuelled by social media — but it has historic roots.
A tiger is the election symbol for one of the three major political parties in Pakistan, the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PMLN), whose founder — Nawaz Sharif — has served as Pakistan's prime minister for three terms, and the animals are often seen at political rallies.
"People were bringing tigers and lions to political rallies and it became a way of showing solidarity with the ruling party or your political affiliation," Ms Jaleel said.
Big cats have also become social media fodder in recent decades, with owners flaunting the pets as a symbol of luxury and wealth. Some are used as props for wedding photos, and cubs are sometimes given as gifts.
In March 2022, a video showing a TikTok celebrity being swiped at by a colleague's pet lion, which had to be restrained, went viral.
WWF Pakistan senior director of conservation Rab Nawaz said influencers played an important role in the conversation around big cat ownership in Pakistan.
"That's half the battle, to make the public understand what goes on in the background, how the animals are kept," he said.
"If the public is behind us or behind the department, it will be very easy to stop.
"Because people will not be buying those animals if they realise the suffering they go through and the danger they pose to the public at large."
In January a Pakistani YouTuber with 5 million subscribers was ordered to create 12 animal welfare videos as punishment for illegally owning a lion cub.
"It was a novel way of actually punishing him. And I think perhaps it did work," Mr Nawaz said.
Legal loopholes
New regulations introduced this year stipulate individuals can keep a pet lion if they pay a fee to obtain a licence and adhere to the required cage size.
The punishment for keeping a lion without a licence is up to seven years in jail.
In recent days, the Punjab government has also said it will enforce the sterilisation of lions, tigers and leopards kept in private possession.
But Ms Jaleel said enforcement was difficult and a patchwork of provincial laws that allowed exotic pet ownership to various extents had hindered any attempts to regulate lion ownership in the past.
"There is just this loophole where the wildlife department is best positioned to exercise authority over these animals but actually doesn't really have authority under the law to do so," she said.
Rehoming confiscated lions also poses a significant challenge because African lions are not indigenous to the Indian subcontinent and cannot be released into the wild.
"They really don't have anywhere to send these animals. So there's really nothing in the law, no policy, that allows them to be sent abroad," she said.
Lions are sent to safari parks and zoos, which have seen an influx of big cats in recent years, many confiscated from private owners.
Ms Jaleel said it was a problem that Pakistan could no longer ignore.
"The proliferation of big cats in the country has become a problem that is just out of control at this point. The wildlife department knows it, the federal government knows it, people know it," she said.
"So really, the question is: How many more lions and people have to suffer before something's actually done about it?"
