Hunting originated out of a need for food. Period.
Do what you like, but give this crap a new name because it is not hunting. Hunting involves actually going and looking for something, and in my opinion that something is food. If you are in a fenced enclosure with a lion released for you to shoot, that is not hunting.
Hunting also originated from a need to destroy predators that endangered communities. This continues today when wolves here come into town to pick off a few dogs or in Africa where lions pic off a few of the locals. A canned hunt is not what I would pay money to do, however, at the time this video was made it was legal in RSA. I'm not so sure that it is now. You also have to realize that yes the lion was in a fenced enclosure, but that enclosure is not exactly like a holding pen, rather it encompasses huge tracts of land, where the lion has many of the same advantages as a lion would in a true wilderness hunt. As you see he nearly got one of them.
Typically a wilderness lion hunt is conducted thus. A game animal is taken by the hunter, often a buffalo which is large enough to keep a lion on the bait for several days, and the carcass is dragged behind the safari vehicle late in the day to lay down a scent trail. The carcass is then secured to the base of a tree and covered with Acacia branches which due to the thorns keeps lesser scavengers off it. A leopard bait by contrast would be hung from a low tree branch perhaps a dozen feet off the ground, and any interfering branches are removed. A blind is constructed of grass some 30 yards away, and the hunters enter the blind well before daylight. When the sun comes up, if there is a lion on bait, and it turns out to be a trophy male, he's taken.
Given those circumstances, the lion portrayed in the canned hunt video is actually taken under what I would consider to be more of a fair chase scenario. But in North America we shoot all sorts of game from blinds, so I suppose that shooting from a blind is seldom complained about. If the lion had been killed with the first shot, the video would of held little interest on a public forum except perhaps on an anti-hunting forum. Something I have noticed though is that people are often upset by the sight of any animal being killed on video, even people who might enjoy hunting stories in magazines. I wonder why that is? Yet when I watch a hunting video, I find that there is often things to be learned from it.
In the case of the lion hunt for example,you can see how difficult it is to hit a fast moving target that is coming straight at you, when you shoot from a standing position, provided that is that you don't write off the fellow's shooting as simply incompetent. Chances are that the PH is a good game shot, and he wasn't any more effective than the others. The disadvantage is that the camera does not have the same angle to the target as the shooter, so one must imagine what his sight picture might look like. In a high powered scope, it would be a blur, and you would no that you only have a couple of seconds to solve the problem or you'll die. That was the reason for the high 5's after the action, not that the lion was dead, but that they were all alive.
