PARIS — When Paris police officers found a lion cub in a Lamborghini during a traffic stop this week, 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 two months old and likely would have died of poor care had police not stopped the luxury sports car Monday 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 in an Associated Press interview Wednesday. “You can buy a cub for less than a dog. It costs 300 euros (US$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.
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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.
And it’s not just in France. Another lion cub is adjusting to life in a Dutch big cat centre after a jogger ran into it last month in a cage dumped in a field in the central Netherlands.
The NGO is suing the driver of the sports car, who was taken into custody after police found the cub. Paris police confirmed the find and the arrest. 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 six-month jail term to another person found with a lion cub, Hutin said.
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