BEIRUT — It's hours before dawn and the marina in Beirut's Dbayeh district is deserted apart from a small group of men lifting a metal cage labeled "live lion" onto a yacht. The passenger is a cub rescued by a Lebanese animal welfare organization from its life as a TikTok video prop.
The group from Animals Lebanon has driven to the waterfront in a small convoy of vehicles, joined by NPR, spaced widely apart to avoid being seen as a threat by Israeli drones overhead. As the sun began to rise, columns of smoke from an Israeli airstrike in Beirut's southern suburbs hung over the city.
The boat trip to Cyprus on Thursday was the first part of a journey to deliver the animal to a wildlife refuge in South Africa.
After flights to Dubai and then Cape Town, Animals Lebanon cofounder Jason Meier and the lion cub arrived at the Drakenstein Lion Park sanctuary Friday. A video sent from there shows the animal, named Sara, in a wire fenced enclosure looking at two lions on the other side that will be part of her new family.
Animals Lebanon says the cub is the fifth lion it has rescued and transported from Lebanon since fighting erupted between the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Israel last year. That fighting has escalated into all-out war since Israel's assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in September. Since Animals Lebanon was founded in 2008, it has rescued and transported 25 lions, tigers and other big cats from Lebanon to sanctuaries around the world.
Before September, the group was able to fly the animals out. But Meier says he was then told by Middle East Airlines, the only carrier still flying in and out of Lebanon, that it was no longer transporting animals. The airline declined to comment on its policies.
Meier, an American who grew up in Michigan, is acutely aware that with so much human suffering as a result of the ongoing war, some people would consider it frivolous to focus on rescuing animals.
"This is the expertise we have, and while we are helping animals, we are directly helping people," he says in an interview in the Beirut apartment he shares with his wife, who is Lebanese and a cofounder of the organization.
The lion has been staying in the couple's spare bedroom in their small apartment in downtown Beirut since September, while Meier was arranging how to get it out of the country.
In its day-to-day activities, the organization rescues and cares for pets left behind when their panicked owners fled Israeli airstrikes. Their headquarters in central Beirut is filled with more than 200 cats, dogs and birds belonging to people displaced by the now year- long conflict.
"We have been contacted more than a thousand times since the end of September and it's not a cat or a dog picking up the phone," says Meier. "These are people who want our help. So yes, we're helping the community by helping animals."
Almost 1 million people in Lebanon have been displaced by Israeli airstrikes — hundreds of thousands of them staying in schools turned into shelters. He says many of the owners come whenever they can to visit their pets.
Animals Lebanon rescued the 4-month-old lion from a social media influencer who the group says was using her as a prop in TikTok videos.
"It wasn't a life for a lion," says Maggie Shaarawi, the group's cofounder and the lion's primary caregiver. "When she came she had scars all over her face and ringworm all over her body. So it took a lot of love and care to get her back to health."
The TikTok posts by a Lebanese social influencer show him carrying a struggling baby lion into an office and a gym as a joke and driving around with her in the front seat of a car.
Just 1 or 2 months old at the time, the lion should have been still with her mother, Meier says.
The animal welfare group eventually won a court order allowing the lion to be confiscated and handed over to them for relocation. By the time they took custody of her in September, she had grown from being small enough to be picked up with one hand to an 80 pound wild animal.
Keeping lions and tigers as pets is illegal in the country although common enough that they are a favorite prop of affluent Lebanese trying to boost their social media followings. The animals come mostly from breeding programs in Lebanese zoos and sell for between $10,000 and $15,000, according to Animals Lebanon.
Even in zoos, non-native animals here generally suffer.
"You don't really have the veterinary expertise in this country," says Meier. "You don't have proper enclosures. The animals are sitting inside, in general, on cement, usually in darkness and without appropriate nutrition. And they just die at an early age."
The animal welfare group has sent four other lions rescued in Lebanon to internationally accredited wildlife facilities in South Africa since last year. They cannot be released into the wild but will live out their lives in family groups with room to roam the preserve.
Other rescued animals include six baboons Meier is trying to get to a sanctuary in Dorset, England, and eight animals from a zook in Baalbek, in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, including lions, bears, a tiger and a jaguar.
The young lion, distressed by the movement and confinement, paces in the cage but quiets when Shaarawi reaches through the bars to scratch her fur. Her caregiver cries as the yacht sets off from the dock, the metal cage set down between tan leather seats. Meier says the luxury vessel ended up being cheaper than chartering other boats.
Videos of Shaarawi caring for the young lion show the healthy-looking cub bounding into her arms, stretching as Shaarawi massages her — a daily routine over the last two months that included hand-feeding and showering the animal.
"She was stuck with me in my apartment for almost two months and I had to care for her," Shaarawi says. "It was challenging. I thought, 'God forbid, there's a bombing — how would I run away with a lion?' But she was the reason I woke up every morning."
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