The big problem with hunting, Packer readily admits, is that the high-stakes industry is self-policed, rife with lawbreakers, and in urgent need of reform. A three-week, top-of-the-line Tanzanian lion safari costs about five thousand dollars a day, including gun-import duty, professional hunter fees, accommodations, and trophy permits. With that kind of money, professional hunters and government officials may look the other way if a client shoots a lion from a vehicle instead of on foot, as the law requires, and then, in defiance of his or her single-trophy license, finds another with a bigger mane and shoots it too. "Hunting-concession holders have been handed the responsibility of managing the largest, most critical tracts of lion territory since the Tanzanian government can't do it alone," Packer says. "It's a tightrope because there are good guys and bad guys, but I believe that I can encourage hunters to clean up their act and harvest in a sensible way by selecting the nonbreeding males with little pride impact."

When apartheid ended in South Africa in 1995, white ranchers who lost their government subsidies began transforming unprofitable cattle operations into game farms, of which there are now some nine thousand covering 42 million acres. Once a pariah state, South Africa today hosts more foreign hunters than any other country on the continent and offers trophy permits for sixty species, including the critically endangered black rhino. Until earlier this year, in a local practice known as "put-and-take hunting," clients on tight schedules wishing to hunt multiple species could pre-order trophy animals by color, sex, and size from game breeders, have them relocated to a private farm, and shoot them all in a week. In its most extreme form, put-and-take became "canned hunting," in which hand-reared predators, mainly lions but also cheetahs, brown hyenas, imported exotics such as tigers, and even lion-tiger hybrids, were shot in small fenced enclosures—even cages—where they had no chance of escape.

In response to the demand for hunts, as well as for lion-skin rugs and live cubs for foreign zoos and private menageries, South Africa developed two parallel lion populations: about 2,700 free-ranging wild animals, most of which are in Kruger National Park, and an approximately equal number of captive lions, many bred specifically for the hunting industry. Of the up to 190 lions that have been killed by hunters annually in South Africa in recent years, about eighty percent were born in captivity, according to the wildlife-trade-monitoring group Traffic.

South Africa is dotted with lion parks and predator petting zoos. After meeting with Joubert and Packer, I drive out of Johannesburg's northern suburbs, past car dealerships and shopping malls, toward Sterkfontein Cave, where paleontologists have uncovered 500 hominid fossils dating back 2.7 million years. Turning off the road in the middle of the veld, I enter Cub World, whose public toilets are marked LIONS and LIONESSES. For a five-dollar entrance fee, I drive my car on a gravel track through a field where three big males—one black-maned, one gold-maned, and one white-maned—live with several females behind chain-link fences topped with razor wire; each pride has its own lot with camelthorn trees for shade and concrete shacks for dens. Returning to the main parking lot, I walk past a picnic area for "cub birthday parties" to an enclosure where I wait in a line of Russian and Pakistani tourists and pay the equivalent of eleven dollars to enter a cage that holds three-month-old white lions. The cubs are sleepy, but one growls when I pat its dusty, rough-haired back. The five-month-old lions asleep in the next cage are "too big and naughty for petting," the guide tells me, claiming that when they reach eighteen months, grown cubs are "moved to conservation parks."