We kill many kinds of creatures and eat them. In South Africa each year around a billion are produced and killed for food. We also shoot them and call it sport. From the point of view of the creatures involved, this is an extreme violation of their most fundamental interests - to continue living, to be free from arbitrary suffering and to have agency to pursue normal behaviours. However, like lions, leopards or hyenas, we're carnivores and that will not change anytime soon. What has increasingly become a major global issue, however, is the lives they lead up to the point of death. It's about their welfare and wellbeing; under those headings in South Africa, turbulent legal battles are mounting. Wellbeing According to changes to the National Environmental Management Laws Amendment (Nemla) Act signed into law in 2022, wellbeing is defined as: "The holistic circumstances and conditions of an animal, which are conducive to its physical, physiological and mental health and quality of life, including the ability to cope with its environment." This has been a long-fought-for definition with roots in an NSPCA private prosecution judgment handed down by the Constitutional Court in 2016, followed in 2018 by a Parliamentary Colloquium challenging the canned hunting of lions.