Imagine you’re an obscenely wealthy Emirati heir, a Saudi prince, or the scion of a global business empire in Dubai.
You started an Instagram account, but sadly photos of your Lamborghinis and McLarens aren’t really moving the needle. In the circles you run in, everyone has those. Likewise, your $20 million digs are pedestrian by the standards of Gulf opulence, and showing off private jets is so 2023.
You need something to stand out, to show the peasants that you’re not just a fabulously affluent heir, you’re also really cool and everyone should envy you.
You need a big cat.
Maybe even cats, plural, if you can’t swing an ultra rare white lion or an 850lb liger on the illegal wildlife market.
Just imagine your follower count blowing up, and how jealous the peasantry will be when you post images of your apex predator pet chillin’ in the passenger seat of your Sesto Elemento, with a pair of $20,000 sunglasses on his head for the lulz.
That’s what’s currently happening in the Gulf among the incredibly well-off children of royalty, aristocrats, oil oligarchs, shipping magnates and other bigwigs, a report in Semafor notes.
In addition to providing compelling ‘tent to their social feeds in the form of photos and videos, it’s clear the owners believe big cats offer a kind of osmotic badassery: if you have your very own lion, you must be a powerful and interesting person!
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This kind of thing is not new. Years ago there was a brief outcry when wildlife groups begged authorities to protect cheetahs, who are already critically endangered and risk extinction if global elites are allowed to continue to poach them and their cubs from the wild.
As CNN noted at the time:
“While many of these states – including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – ban the private ownership and sale of wild animals, enforcement is lax.
The overwhelming majority of these cheetahs end up in Gulf Arab mansions, where Africa’s most endangered big cats are flaunted as status symbols of the ultra-rich and paraded around in social media posts, according to CCF and trafficking specialists.”…
The trend is of “epidemic proportions,” according to CCF, an organization devoted to saving cheetahs in the wild. At the current rates of trafficking, the cheetah population in the region could soon be wiped out.
“If you do the math, the math kind of shows that it’s only going to be a matter of a couple of years [before] we are not going to have any cheetahs,” said Laurie Marker, an American conservation biologist biologist and founder of CCF.
Youtube has its share of dauphins showing off cats and cars, and Instagram has an entire sub-genre of pages featuring men in pristine white robes posing in million-dollar hyper cars next to cheetah cubs or tigers who have been sedated to their eyeballs.
As the Semafor report explains, technically keeping big cats is illegal in most Gulf states, except for the super rich. They can skirt existing wildlife laws by getting permits as private “zoo” and “sanctuary” operators, and who’s to say a good zookeeper can’t keep his jaguars in an enclosure with Maseratis and Aston Martins?
One guy even runs a place called Fame Park, a private zoo. The only way to get in is if he deems you famous enough, and thus worthy, to gaze upon his wondrous menagerie of endangered beasts.
The park’s motto is “Where luxury meets wildlife wonder,” and its operator styles himself as a conservationist who just happens to enjoy rubbing elbows with esteemed figures like Andrew Tate and Steven Seagal.
Things really haven’t changed much in the last few hundred years, have they? One way royals and aristocrats amused themselves was by sending explorers to far off lands and instructing them to bring back strange animals.
That’s how elephants ended up in the courts of European kings, and how Hanno the Navigator found himself in mortal danger when he tried to capture gorillas, then decided they were “too violent” to drag back home and had them executed.
These days, the centers of power have shifted, but human behavior has not. Part of me still has hope, but the cynic in me fears people with the means to exploit rare and endangered animals will continue to do so until there are no more animals left to exploit.
via Pain In The Bud