My name is Maxine Prins and I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I’ve established the Moomba Foundation with as corporate target the wellbeing of ‘wild animals’ living in captivity. Besides that, I want to show the world the truth about the cruelties of the canned hunting industry, and what can be done against it, or at least how we can reduce it.
For me all this started about five years ago when I, as young unknown volunteered at the lion-park in Johannesburg. A video of me playing with two lions at that park went viral on Youtube, for the wrong reason of course.
Few years after that I heard about their involvement in the canned hunting industry and I felt angry and abused. For that reason I went back to SA last year to do some wildlife courses, to learn more about the animals kept and breaded in captivity and what is really going on behind the curtains of this evil industry. During a wildlife course I met a very sad white lion cub, living all alone at a breeding facility. I just couldn’t witness her state and so I saved her by moving her to one of the good parks, in this case Jukani. This was the start of my mission, the Moomba foundation, to help as much sad animals as possible.
I am convinced we must start preventing that more and future volunteers and tourists will make the same mistake as I did. I believe we can make a difference if we start creating awareness by the people who intent visiting wildlife parks as we instead guide them to the parks where the owners not only think about their income but really care for their animals.
That is why I am building up a database of the good and ethical parks where tourists and volunteers can go to without concerns. Only that way we can create travel routes that people can follow so they can enjoy a vacation and still positively contribute to all South African animals. My ultimate target is to create a Mobile App that visitors can use to find a (good) park nearby.
To decide if these parks are good for their animals, I have to visit them and they have to satisfy certain points. Our foundation made a list of requirements we stand for together with people and/organisations and/or foundations that have experience with and knowledge in this field, and helped to accomplish the list of requirements. They have given us their support and agreed with our aim. When the parks satisfy all these points, we want to give them a certificate of being a good ethical park.