Yet by the second day she was worried. The lion cubs, it turned out, were not orphans. Staff took them away from their mothers when they were two weeks old so tourists could pet them and give them bottles.

‘The cubs make all these noises, which sound cute when you don’t know what’s happening. But then you realise it’s them calling out for their mothers,’ Jennings says.

Cub-petting, she explains, is lucrative – she estimates over 50 visitors a day at the safari park where she volunteered. When they are no longer cute, some progress to ‘walking with lions’ – where people pay for a close encounter with a big animal. When this becomes too risky, adult lions are moved into larger enclosures. And from there, Jennings discovered they are not, as staff claimed, ‘shipped to the Democratic Republic of Congo where they are all living happy lives’.

Instead they are more likely to be sold and transported elsewhere in South Africa to be shot by trophy hunters in so-called ‘canned hunting’ enclosures. Canned hunters can pay as little as £4,000 to shoot a female lion, less than half the cost of hunting a wild lion in Tanzania. Or the lions are killed for their skeletons. South Africa is the largest exporter of lion bones for use in traditional medicine in Vietnam, Thailand and Laos.