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In June 2021, a viral Facebook post showed what its author claimed was a lion receiving a foot massage at a big game reserve in South Africa. The widely shared post, published by Sandra Fan on June 10, included two photographs of a lion apparently relaxing and rolling around on its back, while a man rubbed its paws. The caption read: The photographs were authentic, unedited, and did indeed show Larenty giving a lion a foot massage. As such, we are issuing a rating of True. The top picture was taken in 2010. A Getty Images caption provides the following detailed description: The bottom picture was licensed by the Caters agency and originally published in a 2009 Daily Mail article. It reportedly shows the same lion, Jamu. Larenty himself appears to have absolutely no involvement in hunting, as the Facebook post points out. However, the Lion Park — now known as the Lion & Safari Park and relocated from Gauteng to North West province in 2016 — has been embroiled in hunting-related controversy in the past. In 2014, the CBS program 60 Minutes reported that the Lion Park had been selling lions to traders known to sell on the animals to hunting operators, as part of what is known as the canned hunting industry, in which lions are trapped in a fenced enclosure to be shot and killed by heavily armed tourists, many of them American. The Lion Park admitted that, in the past, lions had been sold on to unscrupulous traders, but said this was done inadvertently and they had changed their practices to ensure it would not happen again.
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