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Richardson has described himself as a self-taught zoologist, but he is something deeper-a medium between the world of wild predators and those who present a terminal threat to their survival. In the wild, lions are menaced from three main sectors: the relentless spread of agricultural land, in which 75 per cent of the animals’ natural habitat has been converted into grazing fields for cattle; wildlife clashes, where farmers kill hundreds of lions a year in retaliation for attacks on livestock; and endemic poaching by locals, who can make the equivalent of their annual incomes-about $6,000-by shooting a single lion and selling the meat and bones on the black market. (Lion bones are an acceptable substitute in Asian tiger bone wine, said to boost virility. A status symbol for an exploding Chinese middle class, a case of the potion can fetch as much as US$25,000 at auction.)

As a result, lion populations are being decimated. In 1950, over 200,000 roamed Africa’s vast savannahs. The most recent estimates put the figure at 35,000. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature currently classifies the species as “vulnerable.” Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University in North Carolina who has spent his career studying present-day extinctions, calls it “a full-fledged crisis.” In addition to the ecological costs of knocking off an apex predator, Pimm describes the loss of lions as an ethical defeat. “It’s a measure of the fact that we aren’t being good stewards. What sort of planet do we want to hand to our children and grandchildren?”

But as bad as things are for wild lions, notes Richardson, life is just as tenuous for the 5,000-plus in captivity in South Africa, raised to be slaughtered like chickens. (With the country’s wild lion population averaging 3,000, that means the majority of South Africa’s lions are in cages.) Most captive lions begin their careers as cubs on breeding farms, enjoying the attention of countless visitors. The cats will keep generating money until they’re six months old, at which point tourists will pay as much as $800 for an experience called “walking with,” in which a handler and his guests stroll through a patch of veld with a lion. Twelve months later, no longer adorable, they become fodder for tourists in a practice known as “canned hunting.” In 2007 alone, 16,394 foreign hunters arrived to kill an estimated 46,000 animals, an industry the government considers “a sustainable utilization of natural resources.” According to one report, 5,892 dead lions were exported from the country between 2001 and 2011. The majority were slaughtered in canned hunts.

In his videos, Richardson’s roughhousing showcases these “natural resources” as warm-blooded creatures to an international audience. As his YouTube views rack up, so, too, does his ability to publicize the plight of captive lions and, more broadly, the perils facing a shrinking wild population. Wrestling lions, however, is the easy part. Saving them is the real challenge.

While Richardson’s ruggedness suggests he was born in the bush, his clan hails from the lower-middle-class Johannesburg suburb of Orange Grove, where citrus orchards long ago gave way to family homes with postage-stamp-size lawns.

When Richardson was three or four, his dad helped him rear a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. Dazzled by the experience, Richardson began to nurse other birds, until, by the age of seven, he acquired his first moniker: “The Bird Boy of Orange Grove.” Weavers, pigeons, mourning doves-broken birds by the dozen were brought by neighbours to the family’s home, and Richardson would add them to his growing aviary.

When Richardson was in his early teens, his father died. He acted out, drank heavily, stole cars, even rolled his sister’s vehicle in a crash. He began to lose interest in his birds and one day set the flock free. While he once hoped to study veterinary science, he was lucky to make it into university at all, and even luckier to escape with two years of zoology and a bachelor’s degree in physiology and anatomy. His work as a physical trainer eventually landed him a job at a Johannesburg facility called Lion Park. But Richardson was barely interested in his duties. He had fallen in love with two lion cubs named Tau and Napoleon.

He doesn’t properly understand why, on his first visit, he stepped inside the pen with the youngsters. Richardson had ridden superbikes, flown planes-so youthful machismo may have played a part. Still grieving his father, Richardson suspects he was driven by the need to master his fear of death. Regardless, the impulse was foolhardy. “At six months a lion cub is big,” he explains. “Check out his claws, his teeth-the thing can make a mess of you.”

No sane, unarmed wrangler will stay in an enclosure with a lion older than two and certainly no older than four. Richardson ignored that policy and spent as much time with the brood as possible, bonding as they grew into ornery adolescents and then matured into strapping adults. He discovered-as everyone else at the park soon did-that he had a sixth sense when it came to the cats. He could ask them to stroll alongside him, to roll on their backs to accept a tummy rub. He used no coercion-no sticks, no pepper spray. Lions, he learned, are hugely social, and if welcomed into the pride, he wasn’t just safe, but loved.

And so a brand was born. At 22, Richardson became a star wrangler at Lion Park-a glorified zoo where his antics wowed guests eager to get a taste of the bush in a contained setting. But he realized that, by emphasizing Tau and Napoleon’s cuteness, he was contributing to a trend that meant more cubs doing “cub duty” in competing parks, and thus more lions disappearing when they became too old to manage. “You could say I was part of the problem,” says Richardson.

If he was to do right by the animals he loved, he needed to both stoke his celebrity and eliminate the need for it to exist. Richardson began thinking about moving away from Lion Park and acquiring a facility large enough to let his captive lions roam free for the rest of their lives.