Who Is Kevin Richardson’s Wife?

As of 2015, the Kevin Richardson Wildlife Sanctuary relocated to Welgedacht Private Game Reserve near Pretoria.

Richardson worked in a 650 hectares (1,600 acres) Lion Park in Broederstroom, a town 35 miles north of his hometown, Johannesburg, in South Africa. Whilst primarily specializing in lions, he has also interacted with hyenas and black panthers. The park, which was set up with the help of Rodney Fuhr, is 800 hectares (2,000 acres) and was built for the set of the movie White Lion. Richardson cares for thirty-nine lions at this facility. At this timely, the facility is private, but there are plans in the future to open it to the public. However, the sanctuary is open for guided group tours and has a large volunteering program as of 2014.

Richardson once worked as a lion handler for the lion park that featured in a 2014 segment of the CBS program 60 Minutes, which revealed that the Lion Park in Lanseria bred lions to ensure a supply of cubs year-round. When the lions reached maturity, they were shipped out to canned hunting operations because they were too dangerous to be near tourists.

“It comes as a shock to most people that lions are incredibly at risk with less than 20,000 left in the wild and numbers dropping year on year. Wild lions aside, captive lions suffer equally with three lions shot daily in a canned hunt – a practice which forms part of an elaborate economic cycle that capitalizes on the breeding of lions as if they were cattle. Well-meaning, but naïve tourists flock to South Africa each year to bottle feed or pet lion cubs believing they are contributing to the conservation of the species. This is a terrible deception and if a tourist facility is breeding lion cubs and allowing tourists to pet them – they are almost certainly part of the canned lion hunting network.” — Kevin Richardson, September 2019

Richardson’s 2010 documentary is entitled White Lion: Home is a Journey. The film is about a young white lion named, “Letsatsi,” who survives against all odds. This film is the first to star native lions instead of the regularly imported ones. Rodney Fuhr and his wife, Ilana, independently funded the movie and served as executive producers. The film was shot at the Kingdom of the White Lion, SA Lion Park, Nash’s farm, Glen Afric, and Entabeni Game Reserve. The South African-based company Peru Productions Pty. Ltd.’s first feature film was White Lion.

Kevin Rene Richardson (born 8 October 1974), known as “The Lion Whisperer”, is a South African YouTube personality and self-taught sanctuary owner who works with African lions.

Kevin Richardson grew up in the Nightingale Clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa, on the 8th of October, 1974. He spent his childhood in the neighbourhood of Orange Grove. His mother, Patricia, worked for Barclays Bank and was also born in South Africa. Richardson’s father, who worked for a pharmaceutical company, grew up in the United Kingdom and moved to South Africa from Reading, Berkshire. Kevin Richardson is the youngest of four children: he has an older brother and two sisters who are twins. His father died when Richardson was thirteen years of age. When he was about sixteen, he met Stan Schmidt and began his career as a “self-taught behaviourist.”