YouTuber who illegally owned a lion cub and posted videos to millions of followers handed a big punishment
A YouTuber who illegally owned a lion cub has received his punishment.
Pakistani YouTube content creator Rajab Butt was given the little lion as a wedding gift last month from a man called Umar Dolla, who himself runs a YouTube channel called Lion Hub.
He tried to claim that despite gifting the lion cub away he was still the animal's owner, though a judge ruled that Butt had seized the illegal cat and was thus the new owner of the cub.
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Butt - who has over five million subscribers on the video-sharing platform - was punished with a community service order, meaning that for each of the next 12 months he must make and post an animal welfare video that is at least five minutes long.
The idea of this is to educate his audience about animal welfare, and by the time he's done he'll have created over an hour's worth of animal welfare content.
Butt said in a statement that he regretted keeping the lion cup and said that 'keeping wild animals in such circumstances is inappropriate'.
He said: "As a social media influencer, I should create positive content. I was not authorised to keep the lion cub, and by doing so, I set a wrong example."
The cub has been relocated at the Lahore Safari Zoo and been named Bhatti, while Butt will be helped in his video making endeavours by Pakistan's wildlife department.
The YouTuber was reported to the police after a wildlife official watched one of Butt's videos which showed him being gifted the lion cub at his wedding.
Butt said he would now work to 'provide community service through my social media platforms and spread a positive message about the rights of wild animals'.
Tariq Janjua, director of the Lahore Safari Zoo which the lion cub now calls home, said that lions could not be domesticated and thus keeping them as pets was both cruel to the animal and very dangerous to humans.
For evidence of how dangerous attempting to domesticate lions can be one need look no further than the 'Lion Man' Leon van Biljon who raised three lion cubs as his 'children'.
When they were cubs he used to sleep in their enclosure, but one day in 2019 the 70-year-old went into their enclosure to fix the fence that kept the now-adult lions penned in.
Turning his back to the animals he'd raised since they were cubs, one of them pounced on him and clamped its jaws around his neck, when other people arrived they found the man covered in his own blood with the lions circling his body.
The lions had to be shot so that rescuers could reach van Biljon's body, but it was too late and he died.
Joe Harker