Part of the Pride (21 page)

Mandy had already had some exposure to raising baby animals, so she knew that the novelty of bottle-feeding a cute little ball of fluff soon wore off. We had raised a leopard cub in a house we lived in for a while on Rodney Fuhr's property. The leopard was called Sabrina, and boy, was she a little witch. She bit and she scratched and she tore us and the house to shreds. We'd been told she'd been born in captivity and had been partially hand-raised, but I'm convinced now that she was taken from the wild, a practice I don't agree with. She was a feisty little thing but Mandy and I finally managed to tame her down. She was fine around us, but unfortunately, uh, she tore up some other people who went into her enclosure, and she now lives with a male leopard at another park.

When I told Mandy I was bringing two cheetah cubs to our nice town house, she rolled her eyes. Rodney Fuhr was happy for me to raise Lenny and Arusha because he knew I had the patience and experience to do the job. Some people would try and hand-raise baby animals because they thought they were cute, but few of them had the patience or commitment to see the job through. Helga, the mother of all cubs, was an exception. People who think they have what it takes to raise an animal soon learn the truth about themselves when they realize they have to miss birthdays, parties, public holidays, and Saturday nights out with friends because a cub needs feeding in the middle of the night. I made those sacrifices, but I enjoyed the experience, as well. As always, I kept records, and I knew
that if a cub needed 92.3 milliliters of formula, then that's what it got—not ninety or a hundred.

Lenny and Arusha looked like skinny rats. No pets were allowed in the complex where Mandy and I lived, so needless to say some of our neighbors would have freaked at the thought of us raising two cheetahs. Smuggling Lenny and Arusha inside, in a cardboard box, was a minor military operation.

“All clear,” Mandy hissed from the darkness.

“Coming in now,” I replied, carrying the two squawking cubs. “Hush!”

Lenny and Arusha did it tough. They required constant attention and it took us quite a while to get them on the bottle. When we finally did get them used to formula, they didn't want to be weaned. They both had a problem digesting solid food, which gave them diarrhea and made them throw up. After that they became dehydrated and we had to put them on an electrolyte replacement fluid and other liquids to protect their intestines and rehydrate them.

After weeks of hard work and sleepless nights on our part, Lenny and Arusha were finally picking up. They were getting cute and fluffy and developing cheeky personalities. We thought they were just about ready to move back to the Lion Park. As the cubs were so full of beans, Mandy and I thought we should resurrect our social lives with a well-earned Saturday night out. We decided to go out for a meal and see a movie. Things an ordinary couple might take for granted were a special treat for us. I fed the cheetahs and closed them in the kitchen. As we grabbed our jackets I peeked over the kitchen counter to make sure they were okay. They had their box to sleep in and enough room to play. As I'd learned with the baby hyenas, the only place to safely pen cubs is the bathroom or kitchen, as they're the easiest to clean. Lenny and Arusha looked up at me, a picture of innocence. “Be good now.”

The meal was great and the film a nice distraction after all our time cooped up inside with the cheetahs. I was feeling pretty happy,
until I opened the door and a sickening stench just about overpowered me.

In the wild, cheetahs like to sit on the highest vantage point available. It allows them to survey their territory and scan for prey. In captivity, ours sit up on top of their night houses during the day. The highest points in our town house were the backrests of two lovely new cream-colored sofas that Mandy and I had bought just a few days earlier to replace the beanbags we'd been sitting on up until then.

With one hand over my mouth and nose, I groped for the light switch with the other. When the lights came on I saw Lenny and Arusha sleeping on our new couches. So full of life had the cubs become, they had managed to jump from the kitchen floor up on to the bench tops and serving areas, knocking everything off the counters in the process. From there the rest of the house was just a few bounds away in any direction.

Unfortunately, as I also learned that night, cheetahs like to crap on their high perches, and our two cute little cubs had done just that—all over our cream-colored furniture.

“
I did not sign up for this
!” Mandy wailed.

“Yes, you did, my love, the moment you met me.”

Jackals are incredibly intelligent animals, but they are perceived as vermin on livestock and game farms in South Africa.

Farmers are concerned that jackals will linger around antelope and other animals about to give birth, and kill their offspring as soon as they are born. Research has found, however, that older, experienced jackals don't bother with killing calves or foals, but rather clean up the mother's placenta, or afterbirth.

A problem occurs, however, if an experienced jackal is trapped and killed. If younger jackals move into an area previously dominated by a lone animal, more animals will die. These newcomers
kill the domestic livestock, and as their territories get smaller and they start to breed, there are more hungry mouths to feed. It's better, in my opinion, for a farmer to live with one smart old jackal in an area, and risk losing the odd animal, rather than take out a territorial male and virtually invite more jackals to come and have a go at his game or livestock. It's a hard concept to convey and jackals are up against generations of prejudice.

Nandi was a young, female, black-backed jackal who was brought into the Lion Park by a farmer. The farmer had shot her parents, and Nandi had been wounded in the attack. I found it amazing that the man had no qualms about taking out Nandi's mother and father, but had felt compassion towards their baby.

Nandi had been hit in the back and her little body was full of shotgun pellets. We fixed her up at the Lion Park and a few of us there took on the task of raising her to adulthood. I hoped that by showing Nandi to visitors and explaining her plight, we might be able to change some of the preconceptions people have about jackals. In my lifetime the African Wild Dog, one of the continent's most endangered mammals, has gone from being classed as vermin to one of the most popular animals people can hope to see during a visit to a game reserve or national park, so perhaps there was hope for Nandi and her kind. I wasn't the only person who cared for Nandi, but I believed we were forming a close relationship.

As Nandi got older she started turning on some of the people who had raised her, biting them when they came into her enclosure. One of the keepers, Cara, started going in with her, as did Helga, however neither of them had the same relationship with Nandi that I did. Nandi would tolerate Cara and was friendly with Helga, but that was about as far as it went. One by one, over a period of months, she began eliminating humans from her life until it became clear that I was the only person she accepted fully inside her domain.

We decided it would be nice for Nandi to have some company of her own kind, especially as she had rejected almost all her human
friends. We were given another jackal called Wilbur, from the Johannesburg Zoo. I really hoped that Nandi and Wilbur would mate as I thought it would be cool for us to have some baby jackals to show off at the park. From everything I had learned about jackals, I was fairly sure that Nandi and Wilbur would hit it off immediately, but that wasn't to be. Nandi tolerated Wilbur and occasionally they would squabble and snap at each other, but there was no way she was going to let Wilbur mate with her.

Whenever I entered Nandi's enclosure she would jump up and run across to me, then leap up into my arms. Wilbur, I could see, was quite irritated by this, and occasionally he would sneak around behind me while I cradled Nandi, and nip me on the bum with his sharp little teeth.

“I don't get it,” I said to Cara one day.

Care smiled. “I do. Jackals mate for life.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, still not seeing what had been staring me in the eyes from the animal in my arms. “So why won't she mate with Wilbur?”

“You're the only one for Nandi, Kev. She thinks you're her man and she's not interested in anyone else.”

TEN
 
Part of the Pride

 

 

 

The Lion Park pitched to provide the lions and one of the locations for a French film called
Le Lion
—The Lion. It was a big deal for the park, and we won the contract to do the film shoot, but the most important thing in my life at that time was an imminent birth.

There was a rumor going around the park at the time that Mandy was pregnant, and that I was going to be a first-time dad. The rumormongers got the first part wrong. Mandy was definitely not expecting, but my girl Maditau definitely was.

Maditau and Tabby, the two female cubs who were only a few weeks old when I first met Tau and Napoleon, had been living in the same enclosure for a while with my two favorite male lions. My boys had been living the life of a pair of bachelors for their formative years, and this was perfectly natural for lions, as it had been for me until I met Mandy. It had given Tau and Napoleon time to grow and learn some discipline, and basically how to be a lion. It also meant they wouldn't go all stupid the first time they come into contact with a lioness in estrus. My boys had earned their stripes, and they were eventually put in with Maditau and Tabby, my two girls.

We learned from the French film company that they wanted to shoot in June, in the middle of the South African winter. This is standard for filming in southern Africa as our winter is long and dry. We would be assured—as far as one can make assurances about the weather—of clear blue skies and spectacular blood red sunrises and sunsets through the dust and smoke and smog that coats Johannesburg at that time of year.

Two weeks before shooting began, Maditau gave birth to three male cubs and I was over the moon. A few days later—to the surprise of me and everyone else—Maditau's sister Tabby gave birth to two female cubs. We didn't even know she was pregnant. If Tau and Napoleon were my brothers, then I was now uncle to three boys and two girls. I didn't know which of the lions had fathered which of the cubs, but that didn't matter, as we were all happy.

As first-time moms, however, Maditau and Tabby were poles apart. Maditau did a fantastic job raising her litter, taking the cubs to her teats straight away and licking their tiny bottoms to help them defecate. She was proud and protective, as a lioness should be. Tabby, however, left her two cubs for dead. She wanted nothing to do with them.

I'd read that lionesses in the wild would sometimes adopt a sister's cubs if something happened to the other mother, and I have since had some success in staging adoptions in captivity. I gave it a try with Maditau, thinking she might not be able to tell the difference between three cubs and five. I carried the two little females into Maditau's night enclosure, when she was a safe distance away, and left them there. I sat down outside to watch what happened.

Maditau sauntered inside, walked over to one of the new arrivals, and picked it up in her mouth by the scruff of the neck. I felt a moment of hope. She had identified the cub, but had not savaged it or ignored it. Maditau carried the tiny bundle to her water bowl and dropped it in with a splash.

While the helpless cub squealed and thrashed in the water,
Maditau calmly walked over to the other little female, picked her up, walked back to the bowl, and dropped her in with her sister. I couldn't believe it. The cubs were yelling their heads off, but Maditau just walked back to her three male young, sat down beside them, and went back to sleep.

I thought, “This is not on!” I got up and went into her enclosure. Everyone had always told me to stay away from a lioness with newborn cubs, but I couldn't let those two little girls drown. Maditau opened her eyes as I entered, but she was as calm, cool, and collected with me as she had been while going about her business a few moments before, trying to drown her nieces. I fished the wet, panicked cubs out of the water bowl and hurried them back to the nursery.

The hapless youngsters were named Meg, after the actress Meg Ryan, and Ally, after Calista Flockhardt's character Ally McBeal in the television show of the same name, which was a hit at the time. Some of the staff, however, couldn't pronounce Ally too well, so she ended up being called Ami.

Meg and Ami, who had been sired by my brothers Tau and Napoleon, became like foster children to me. If I was uncle to Maditau's boys then I was dad to Meg and Ami. I have been with them all of their lives. I was angry, though, at Maditau for not accepting them, and at Tabby for rejecting them. My girls had put me in a difficult position. With filming about to start I was going to be bottle-feeding two cubs at night after long, hectic days on the set. Also, with no cubs to suckle, Tabby would come back into estrus straight away so our leading lions, Tau and Napoleon, would be distracted while they were supposed to be working.