This is not sport. It's murder.

Warning: The images in this post could be distressing for some readers. 

When pictures of 19-year-old hunter Kendall Jones went viral earlier this week, many were horrified.

The photos showed the smiling, sunny Texan cheerleader next to the animals she had shot and killed. White lions. Rhinoceroses. Zebras.

But as more details of her hunting habits were revealed, what many found just as shocking were the circumstances under which the animals had lost their lives.

Jones claimed she was killing the animals as part of a “conservation” effort.

“Controlling the male lion population is important within large fenced areas like these in order to make sure the cubs have a high survival rate,” Jones wrote on her Facebook page.

“Funds from a hunt like this goes partially to the government for permits but also to the farm owner as an incentive to keep and raise lions on their property. […] Now to the leopard, this was a free ranging leopard in Zimbabwe on communal land. The money for the permit goes to the communal council and to their village people.”

Kendall was reportedly taking part in what is known as “canned hunting”.

If you’re wondering what “canned hunting” is – think battery hens but with big cats and you’ll have the basic idea.

It is a legalised practice where lions (and some other large animals) are removed from the wild or bred in captivity, and kept in conservation parks and breeding programs. They are brought up among humans. They are bottle fed, and petted by children and tourists.

When they are old enough, some of these lions are sold to zoos or safari parks. Some are sold to private collectors. And many are sold to canned hunting parks.

At the canned hunting park, a lion will be drugged and released into a contained field, where it has nowhere to run. This is where Kendall – and others like her – come in. A hunter pays between $5000 and $30,000 to enter the field with a shotgun, or a handgun, or a crossbow.

And then the hunter shoots the lion – a lion that has been raised among humans, and become acclimatised to their presence – and kills it.

What a “sport.”

As with any animals bred for human entertainment – and not food – the lions are mostly well-looked after. Hunters, after all, don’t want to mount mangy big game on their walls at home. They want their kill to be big, beautiful and ferocious.

The female lions in the breeding parks usually have their young removed from them soon after they are born – both to ensure that the cubs don’t become dependent on their mother, and to make sure that the female lion will become fertile again quickly.

Evolutionary biologist Pieter Kat told The Guardian,  “Lions and tigers in captivity may kill their young because they are under a lot of stress. But the main reason breeders separate the young from their mother is because they don’t want them to be dependent on their mother. Separation brings the female back into a reproductive position much faster than if the cubs were around. It’s a conveyor-belt production of animals.”

Critics of the sport point out that canned hunting is doing very little protect lions that are already in the wild, and that few lions bred in captivity are ever released back into the wild. Most are sold on. Mimi Bekhecki wrote for the Independent recently that, “The large sums of money wasted on breeding in zoos would be more responsibly directed toward legitimate conservation groups working to end canned hunts and to address other factors contributing to the decline of lions in the wild.”

There is also little evidence to suggest that canned hunting is helping wild lion population levels.

The Guardian reports that:

 “Wild populations of lions have declined by 80% in 20 years, so the rise of lion farms and canned hunting has not protected wild lions. In fact, according to Fiona Miles, director of Lionsrock, a big cat sanctuary in South Africa run by the charity Four Paws, it is fuelling it. The lion farms’ creation of a market for canned lion hunts puts a clear price-tag on the head of every wild lion, she says; they create a financial incentive for local people, who collude with poachers or turn a blind eye to illegal lion kills.”

But perhaps the reason that many people have had such a visceral reaction to the photos of Kendall Jones standing with her “trophies” is not rational. It’s not about lion conservation efforts, and what is the most effective way to go about protecting an endangered species.

It’an emotional reaction.

It’s because even though humans have hunted for 200,000 years for food – there is something unsettling about seeing a person celebrate the fact that they have just killed a living creature, when they don’t need to.

It’s because although there are arguments to be made that canned hunting and breeding programs increase the numbers of animals alive — there is something about the idea of lions being farmed like battery hens, that doesn’t seem like ‘living’ at all.

These emotional reactions are harder to defend and more difficult to debate. But emotional arguments – based on compassion and empathy – are also what make us human.

Here’s some footage from a canned hunt (Warning: Ths could be distressing for some readers):

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What do you think about the idea of hunting being used to aid conservation efforts? Is it counter-intuitive, or a good idea? What was your reaction to the photos?