A man approaching the lion on the rooftop of a home in central Kabul.
KABUL: For Kabul’s elite some things are de rigueur: Armed guards, a marble-clad mansion, a blacked-out SUV. But one man has taken the flamboyant lifestyle a step further and bought a lion.
Businessman Mohammad Shafiq, 42, is proud of his growling pet, which spends its days prowling a terrace at his sprawling home in a posh residential area in the district of Taimani in central Kabul.
“A friend said he had a lion in Kandahar and wanted to sell it to me,” Shafiq, who runs a construction company, said. “He knew I love dogs and birds, but this was more than what I was expecting. “I had seen lions on TV and in the zoo, but never this close. So I said I will buy it. To me, lions are brave and I respect them.” The lion, still unnamed, is not chained up and has no collar and spends much of the day lying quietly in a corner of the terrace above a storeroom, coming down each evening to eat.
Shafiq says he spends about $1,000 a month employing a caretaker to feed it fresh meat bought from a butcher and paying a vet to check its health regularly.
Tens of billions of dollars have flown into Afghanistan in the 12 years since the US-led invasion that toppled the Taliban. Some Afghans have become very rich. But Shafiq is thought to be the only person to acquire such an unusual status symbol. Shafiq, who says he was a resistance fighter when the Taliban fell and made money through construction contracts for clients, including the US embassy, said he had owned the male cub for two months and thought it was now about six months old.
“It cost me $20,000, including transport from Kandahar to Kabul by road,” he said, declining to explain about how the lion was driven on the 480km route often hit by insurgent bombs and ambushes. He brushed off suggestions he is being cruel by keeping a large wild animal in captivity in a city, and said he though it may have come to Afghanistan via Iran. He has plans to move it to a large pen in the backyard of another property in the capital.
Claire McMaster, Wildlife Director at the World Society for the Protection of Animals, criticised Shafiq, warning that any captive lion posed a serious threat to human life.
“Wild animals should not be kept as pets as it is cruel to hold them in captivity and confined away from their natural habitat, especially as owners are unlikely to meet their complex needs,” she said. “The other problem with keeping a wild animal as a pet is that unlike domesticated animals, the size and unpredictable behaviour could lead to serious injury or death to the owner.”
Kabul Zoo has a lioness donated by China, and was once home to a half-blind lion called Marjan, who became a symbol of Afghan survival after living through coups, invasions, civil war and the Taliban era. Marjan, born in 1976, was blinded by a grenade thrown by a soldier whose brother had been killed after entering its cage, but lived on through until 2002. “I would be shocked if there is a pet lion in Kabul,” Aziz Gul Saqeb, Director of Kabul Zoo, said. “It’s very hard to keep a lion, it’s a wild animal.”
Shafiq admits he may not be able to keep it long term. “I don’t know, I will see and I might give him to Kabul Zoo one day,” he said. AFP
