When the Story Bites Back: The Day a Telegraph Journalist Was Mauled by a ‘Tame’ Lion
For a journalist, getting the story is paramount. But in 2007, Telegraph foreign correspondent Colin Freeman didn’t just get the story—he became its most visceral headline. While on assignment in South Africa, Freeman experienced a terrifying, life-altering event when he was mauled by a lion he was told was tame. His ordeal became a brutal, first-hand lesson in the story he was there to investigate.
Freeman was at the Harrismith Lion and Tiger Park, a facility about 200 miles south of Johannesburg. His assignment was to report on the controversial industry of “canned hunting”—the practice of breeding lions in captivity to be shot by wealthy tourists in controlled enclosures. Part of this industry involves raising cubs that tourists can pay to pet and pose with, habituating the animals to humans from a young age.
It was in this context that Freeman met Timba, a three-year-old, 250lb male lion. The park’s British owner assured him the animal was “placid” and perfectly safe to be near. To get a compelling photograph for his feature, Freeman agreed to pose next to the majestic creature.
For a moment, the scene was calm. Then, in a terrifying flash, the wild instincts that no amount of domestication can erase took over. Without warning, Timba lunged. The lion clamped its jaws around Freeman’s left arm, its teeth sinking deep into his flesh. The full weight and power of the predator were upon him as it began to drag him away.
“I remember a deep, angry growl,” Freeman later recounted in his own article for The Telegraph. “He wasn’t playing. He was trying to kill me.”
The attack was swift and brutal. The lion’s teeth were like “four-inch-long carving knives,” tearing through tissue and narrowly missing the main artery. It was only the quick action of the park’s handler, who repeatedly struck the lion with a stick, that forced Timba to release his grip.
Freeman was rushed to a nearby hospital, bleeding profusely. Doctors worked to stitch the deep puncture wounds that ran up his arm. He had been lucky; had the lion’s teeth severed his brachial artery, he could have bled to death in minutes.
The incident was steeped in a profound and bloody irony. Freeman had set out to expose the dangers and ethical bankruptcy of treating wild predators as pets or commodities. The very animal raised in that system provided the most potent evidence for his story’s thesis: a “tame” lion is never truly tame. These animals, even when hand-reared, retain the powerful instincts of an apex predator.
In the aftermath, Freeman’s story became an international sensation, serving as a stark cautionary tale. His experience highlighted the immense risks of wildlife tourism that promotes close contact with dangerous animals. Conservationists pointed to the attack as a textbook example of why habituating predators to humans is a perilous practice for both species. It creates a false sense of security for people and often ends with the animal being euthanized after an inevitable incident.
Colin Freeman recovered from his injuries, but the physical and psychological scars remained. He turned his traumatic experience into powerful journalism, writing with chilling clarity about the attack and the industry that enabled it. His story wasn’t just a report from the field; it was a testament, written in his own flesh and blood, to the unforgiving and untameable power of the wild. It remains one of the most sobering reminders that when you report on the lion, sometimes the lion reports back.
