Craig Busch
| Craig Busch | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Craig Kevin Busch 18 December 1964 Palmerston North New Zealand |
| Other names | The Lion Man |
| Known for | The Lion Man |
Craig Busch (born 18 December 1964) nicknamed "The Lion Man", is a New Zealand television personality. He was the founder and majority shareholder of Zion Wildlife Gardens Ltd, which featured on television programme The Lion Man. Zion Wildlife Gardens is now named Kamo Wildlife Sanctuary.
Busch has said that while spending time in Utah, in a mountainous region populated with wild cougars, he developed a friendship with one of these cougars and realised that interacting with big cats was his mission in life. Later he spent time in Hollywood as an animal handler for studios and wealthy individuals.
On his return to New Zealand in 1996, Busch built Zion Wildlife Gardens, initially in Kerikeri where he leased a property from the Cornelius family, and then relocated it to the current site, north of Whangarei.
In 2002 Busch purchased five white tigers from Bonnie Ringo of Cave Junction, Oregon in the United States.
Busch said he aimed to breed big cats to increase their numbers.
In 2005, Busch arranged the exchange of New Zealand's first natively born white tigers, Tane and Aotea (born January 2005), and later Kiwi and Rongo (born 2 October 2005), with a white lion cub named Gandor from the Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve near Johannesburg.
Busch featured in the reality series The Lion Man, which became one of New Zealand's biggest selling television series internationally. The series was shown in more than 130 different countries.
In January 2006, Auckland builder Robert Reece alleged Busch owed him NZ$400,000. Reece had planned to take court action to recover the debt during the following month. Reece claimed he had financed the majority of the zoo facilities at Zion Wildlife Gardens. He also had claimed he had paid NZ$80,000 for Busch to go to the USA and obtain five white tigers for the park. Reece had been involved with Busch since around 2000.
In 2007, Busch was convicted in the Whangarei District Court of assaulting his former partner Karen Greybrook in 2005. Greybrook sustained a cut to her head, a fractured vertebra and bruising. Greybrook died from unrelated complications during September 2011 in Australia, where she had resided for some years after the assault.
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