The lion rescuers met at midnight in the carpark of a hotel in the Romanian city of Suceava, 50km from the Ukraine border.
“It sounds very ominous,” says Lionel de Lange, a South African wildlife park owner who led the operation. “But it was really the first time the 13 of us had ever met and we got on the road. Five minutes later our first vehicle broke down.”
Their destination was a zoo in the port city of Odesa, an eight-hour drive through the war-torn country, where nine lions were rapidly running out of food.
Ukraine is home to a large number of exotic animals held in private zoos or as amusements in hotels and tourist venues. The Russian invasion, which has displaced more than 14 million people, of which seven million have fled Ukraine as refugees, also prompted an influx of animal rights organisations determined to rescue animals that had been left behind.
But few wildlife rescuers have the ability to remove and rehome a pride of lions.
De Lange has lived in Ukraine since 2014, rescuing bears, wolves and lions from unsafe conditions through the organisation Warriors of Wildlife. He spoke to the Guardian from a cafe in Bucharest, the day after finishing the 72-hour journey to retrieve the lions and settle them safely in a Romanian zoo.
Lionel de Lange, left, with the team of lion rescuers in Odesa. Photograph: Nathan Lainé/Magnus News
The nine lions from Odesa took his tally of big cats brought across the border to 38.
Even with his experience in planning animal extractions, things can easily go wrong. Before the truck broke down, De Lange had to change his planned route to avoid Russian bombing.
He decided to travel through Moldova, requiring a new set of paperwork under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) to approve cross-border travel, and a new round of negotiations with both Moldova and Ukraine to provide a police escort.
“That wasn’t to protect us against Russians,” De Lange says. The police were on hand to shoot the lions in case of an accident.
“Just in case something does go wrong you have got to have someone on standby that can deal with sedation, to have firearms available, if there’s an accident, if a box falls off after you’ve been in an accident and it splits open … because the authorities when we’re at the border post ask us all these questions as to how safe it is and what we’re doing. With one lion they don’t really bother, and I’ve done it before, but nine lions it made everyone really wary.”
The rescue crew, a collection of British army veterans and a veterinarian, arrived in Odesa at 4pm last Monday, too late to begin the seven-hour long sedation and loading process. The zoo owner paid for them to spend the night in a five-star seaside hotel, where the lights were turned out at 9pm so that Russian missiles could not target them.
“That was probably the weirdest part,” De Lange says. “We enjoyed our meals by the glow of our telephones.”
British vet Gemma Campling sedates a lion before its removal from Odesa. Photograph: Nathan Lainé/Magnus News
The next morning the lions were sedated, given a health check and vaccinated before being lifted pallbearer-style into travelling crates, where they were woken up before the journey began. Four were loaded into a Ford Transit van driven by De Lange, another four were placed on the back of an ex-military truck, and one was in the back of a converted ambulance.
All made the journey safely, save some bumps and bruises from the travel crates.
“It’s stressful from the first moment you see them when you realise ‘I am going to knock them down’,” De Lange says. “You’re dealing with wild animals who are completely unpredictable, and then you are adding in the element of travelling … you might get attacked if the Russians decide to target that area on that time of the morning or the day, so there are so many things you are thinking about constantly.”
The most difficult part of the operation, De Lange says, was finding a zoo in Romania that would take nine lions, the largest of which weighed 230kg, until a more permanent home could be organised.
The city of Târgu Mureș agreed to host the lions until 1 September, by which time De Lange hopes to have secured them a permanent home in a sanctuary in the US.
“All the other stuff was easy – getting vehicles, doing the trip, even though it was a little bit nerve-racking at time and we didn’t know if we were going to be in the middle of a missile strike or not. It was finding a temporary home for nine cats [that was difficult].”
The rescue was funded by Animals Australia, which raised money to cover vehicle hire. It is the second lion rescue the organisation has funded since the war began on 24 February.