Chirkane, the rebel that was sacrificed

There are places where we “love” to see wild animals, so much so that they are forced to live among us. But beware, they are meant to be “savages” as we understand them, that is, captives, tamed and servile. And beware of those who do not fully submit. Chirkane, the “circus lion”, paid with his life.

Guilty of being a lion

This is the terrible news that we have just learned in a letter from the Prefecture of Maine-et-Loire, dated November 21st, 2019. Thus, Chirkane was killed, following a misconduct on May 7th 2017. That day, exhausted, no longer tolerating his conditions of detention and the violence, he refused to carry out an order and instinctively kicked back. Although it was not a deadly attack, the large predator was found guilty. Just when he decided to express his weariness, when he behaved like a free lion, he had signed his own death warrant!

A wall of silence

Since the accident, we had feared the prospect of this tragic end and had stepped up our efforts to have Chirkane entrusted to us. But we regularly ran into brick walls, for him and his brother Elyo. We asked the Maine-et-Loire Prefecture to withdraw Elyo and let us know where Chirkane was. In response, the Prefect told us that he had alerted the director of veterinary services. Then, after that, radio silence ...

Months of battling and hope

For our part, in parallel with our fight for Elyo which led to his placement in a zoo-refuge, we continued to knock on all doors about Chirkane, including that of CADA (Commission for Access to Administrative Documents) and the Ministry of Ecological and Inclusive Transition. We ended up grabbing the latter to finally know where he was. A month later, a rather evasive answer informed us that the "operator" no longer held lions and that an animal was now equipped with a transponder ... Was it Chirkane? There was still hope… It continued to motivate us until the reception of that fatal letter from the Prefect at the beginning of the week, officialising the «euthanasia» of Chirkane. A priori, this poor male was killed as early as 2018 and probably in front of Elyo, his brother, his cage companion…

The fight goes on

Attached to this announcement, a decree states that the former operator of Chirkane has been refused renewal of its operating license. If, of course, we are happy to have saved Elyo and that the circus has lost his authorization to welcome other felines, we feel a deep sadness for Chirkane, a large wild beast delivered as food to this human madness and whose death could have been avoided. The announcement of his slaughter also reinforces our worries about Sultan, another lion in the hands of the Circassians, of whom we have lost track of since the beginning of 2018. We fear the worst but we will not stop fighting to burst out and uncover the truth about how circuses and the authorities who are responsible for protecting animals really treat them.