Selfies create uproar in Paris
PARIS — When Paris police officers found a lion cub in a Lamborghini during a traffic stop, they exposed the tip of what animal campaigners say is a bizarre and disturbing new trend: People buying or renting cubs to take bling-bling selfie photos of themselves with a baby big cat.
The male cub, named Putin but known as Dadou, is less than 2 months old and likely would have died of poor care had police not stopped the luxury sports car last week on the Champs-Elysees and rescued the cat, according to 30 Million Friends, the French animal protection NGO now caring for it.
“There are hundreds of babies going around like this illegally,” the group’s president, Reha Hutin, said. “You can buy a cub for less than a dog. It costs ($340) and so they buy them off circuses.
“It’s really a disaster,” she said. “They get these babies and they take selfies with them on social media.”
Hutin believes the fad spread to France from Gulf countries. Wealthy people in the Gulf pose with baby cubs and “take photographs of themselves in the car,” she said. “Once they grow up they’re just thrown out.”
The NGO works with a sanctuary in Jordan that already houses 30-40 abandoned wild cats.
“What’s terrible (is) it’s coming to France. We’ve literally saved four babies in the last six months because they are copying those guys,” Hutin said.
Not just in France. Another lion cub is adjusting to life in a Dutch big cat center after a jogger ran into it last month in a cage dumped in a field in the central Netherlands. Police found this lion cub last week in a Lamborghini during a traffic stop on the Champs-Elysees in Paris.
The NGO is suing the driver of the sports car, who was taken into custody after police found the cub. Sports cars are often offered for hire on the Champs-Elysees, for tourists to take short, high-adrenaline rides on the famous avenue and surrounding streets.
“This was a Lamborghini, a fabulous green Lamborghini and the police noticed that the guy inside had this cub,” she said. “They stopped him, they took the car, they took the cub and, of course, we went to get the cub.”
In a separate case brought by 30 Million Friends, a French court handed a 6-month jail term to another person found with a lion cub, Hutin said.
“We were very happy to get that. Maybe it will dissuade the others,” she said.
The Lamborghini cub is the third recovered by 30 Million Friends in a month and the sixth wild cat in under a year. One, a small lioness, was found by the customs brigade in a cage in a garage in the southern French port city of Marseille.
The NGO is calling for beefed-up government measures against the trafficking of wild animals and their use in French circuses.
The Lamborghini cub is basically fine, although a health check by a vet found that it was in a weakened state, has a problem with one of its back paws and a broken tail, 30 Million Friends said.
The cub is now in quarantine in a big cat wildlife park east of Paris.