The Man And The Lion, An Instagram Story.

Maybe you have a normal Instagram account. You may use it to upload your own photos, get notes through them and, eventually, gain new followers and more popularity. There is more than one way of doing that – you can make mind-blowing content, you may make a deal with your friends or another follower to promote each other’s content or you may get to choose other ways. However, as special as your own account may be, there are always some people who take Instagram to the next level.

Instagram user Skwall with playing with his lion

There are some pretty special accounts on Instagram, and one of them belongs to a use called Skwall (old account)

Not as unknown as one may think at first – look at those 288 thousand followers, 38% of whom reportedly are Americans – what immediately catches the stranger’s eye is that, in a lot of his photos, this Kuwait-based user shares the frame with a majestic lion – a lioness, in fact, given that it has no mane showing.

Big Cats of the Gulf, an article published in Vice, presented together with a 30-minute video, deals with the subject of owning exotic animals, an image which is becoming more and more common in the rich middle East countries. Although the international law forbids to import or sell these animals, it is getting normal to see them in Arab and middle Eastern Instagram accounts, normally seated on the front seat of luxury cars.

This new “trend” has an impact in the wildcat populations of Central and Eastern Africa, where most of the lions come from. Not only the life of the animals is endangered, but also their owners get in trouble – or they should, we’d better say. In Kuwait, where Skwall comes from, buying an illegal animal is as taking candy from a baby. At least, when it comes to Skwall and his lioness, it seems they both are having a great time.