Part of the Pride (9 page)

I believed then, as I still do today, that it's important to keep animals in captivity stimulated and engaged, and the same thing went for me. I'm an active person and I need to keep myself busy. I could never be a keeper who stood outside an enclosure and opened the gate only when the food truck arrived. I visited all the animals in the park on a daily basis and checked out their enclosures and food and water supplies, and looked for ways that I thought things could be improved.

By the time I started working at the park officially, Richard had left and a new manager, Ian Melass, was settling in at the park. I got on well with the new man. I'm sure a lot of the people at the park didn't know what to make of me. Here I was, the big boss's “informant,” who spent a lot of his time in the enclosures with the lions, forming relationships with them. I'm sure there were a few raised eyebrows.

One person who definitely found my methods unorthodox was Alex, a lion trainer from England; Richard had hired him before he left the park. Alex only ever went in with the lions if he was carrying a stick, as this was accepted practice where he was from, and for keepers in general. Tau and Napoleon, however, weren't used to people carrying sticks around them, even if this was the accepted way of working with lions.

Tau didn't respond well to Alex, and Alex preferred not to work with him. His recommendation was that Tau was not a workable lion and that the park should consider selling him. He said Tau couldn't be trusted because of his clear eyes. Tau and Napoleon
were getting bigger by this stage and developing their manes. They were no longer cubs and some people were getting concerned about my safety. They were worried about me bending down in front of them, and couldn't believe I had begun hand-feeding them pieces of meat and letting them drink water out of my hands. These were other things one was never supposed to do with lions, but I'd been doing it for months.

Rodney, who by this stage was almost like my father, took me aside one day at the park. “I've heard about some of the things you're doing with the lions, Kevin, and I'm worried. You roll around on the ground with them, playing . . . maybe you're getting too physical with them.”

“Rod, I'm just sitting with them, that's all,” I said, omitting the bit about how I put my hands in their mouth and grabbed them by the canines, or how I tugged on their tongues.

“What if they jump on you one day for real?”

Others thought I was entirely loopy when they saw me playing with Tau's teeth and pulling his tongue.

To be fair to other trainers, the other difference between them and me was that I was not training Tau and Napoleon, or any of the other animals, to work on film or television commercials or do anything in particular. I was simply establishing relationships with many of the residents of the Lion Park, and in the process Tau, Napoleon, and I were becoming even closer—almost like three brothers. I was doing all this because I wanted to, and because I thought they were enjoying the interaction, as well—not in order to teach them to do tricks in front of a camera.

The Lion Park was approached to help with the filming of a television commercial, and the advertising company wanted a lion with a well-developed mane.

At the time, Tau and Napoleon were our most mature male lions,
and Ian, who had been dealing with the clients, asked me if I would like to be involved.

“What do you say?” he said. “You've got a good relationship with Tau and Napoleon. Do you think you could get one of them to walk from left to right in front of a camera?”

It seemed pretty simple. Richard, the former manager, had begun to establish a relationship with Napoleon, but after he had left it had just been me inside the enclosure with the two boys, and Alex, the trainer, had already made it clear he didn't want to work with Tau.

So I found myself working on a film set with Tau and Napoleon as star and stand-in.

When the day arrived I wasn't so sure it was going to be easy, but when the camera crew was set up behind the safety of a lion-proof cage, I called to Tau. He walked from left to right in front of the camera. “Good boy, that's my boy, Tau,” I said. I scratched and hugged his big, maned head and fed him a piece of meat.

I hadn't trained the lions to respond to the offer of food—I hadn't trained them at all, in fact. I was never usually around at their feeding time, so it wasn't that Tau had responded to me because he associated me with food. He did it because I asked him to do it; as a bonus, he got a reward. The film crew was happy and the rest of the day went like clockwork. Napoleon got in on the act, as well, and the cameraman shot some scenes of both lions walking together in front of the camera.

People are always trying to pigeonhole me, but I don't fit into any of the stereotypes that people think of in the business of keeping lions. Since that first day I have worked with lions on many other commercials, documentaries, and feature films, but I do not consider myself an animal “wrangler.” I am not a
leeu boer
, which is Afrikaans for lion farmer—someone who breeds cats for zoos or hunting—although I have raised lions from cubs. Although I studied zoology for a couple of years, I am not a zoologist, and while I
have been a keen student of animals and their behavior all my life, I am not an animal behaviorist. Tau and Napoleon did as I wanted them to on the day of that first commercial shoot, and many others since then, but I am not a lion trainer. My boys did what they did because they wanted to. Sure, they could tell I had a reward in my hand, but I have never used the promise of food to get them to do something that did not come naturally to them.

Eventually, Rodney gave me a full-time job at the Lion Park and I was able to give up the personal training, which I was not sorry about. I had found something I truly loved doing and my life had turned around. It was a complete career and life change, for the better.

At the same time, Rodney Fuhr was looking to set up a new research camp in Zambia. He'd acquired some land at Maziba Bay on the edge of the mighty Zambezi River, but was running into problems there. When the manageress of the camp was shot, Rodney abandoned that site and invested in an alternative camp in the Liuwa Plains area, which had become available.

One of my jobs was to help organize the logistics for its setup. Liuwa Plains is in western Zambia, near the border of Angola. It's a wild, remote place that each year hosts what is considered to be Africa's second largest wildebeest migration, after the Serengeti-Masai Mara migration. Poaching during the years of Angola's protracted civil wars took a heavy toll on the animal population. The area was also well known for its predator species, but these, too, had suffered at the hands of poachers and local villagers who feared for their safety. The researcher Rodney was funding was going to study the migration and the presence of hyenas in the area.

I had to organize supplies and help kit out a Unimog four-by-four truck which would be used to resupply the camp. Rodney also bought an ultra-light aircraft, with the aim of training the researcher to fly,
so he could track the wildebeest migration from the air. It was interesting work, and like working with lions, it was a new field for me. At the end of 2000, I reaped the rewards for helping set up the camp when Rodney offered me the chance to visit the plains.

It was staggeringly beautiful wide-open countryside, with grassy emerald floodplains stretching away to the far horizon. It seemed the most isolated spot I'd visited in Africa, yet the reality was that even here animals and humans had problems coexisting. The Lozi people lived on the border of the Liuwa Plains National Park, where they grazed their cattle. Unfortunately, as the park was not fenced, predators were drawn outside the park by the promise of an easy meal. Poachers and villagers had exacted a toll in response and Liuwa Plains's lion population had dwindled to just a handful of animals. One lioness, Lady Liuwa, had taken to living among the tents and tree islands around Rodney's camp, because she knew instinctively that this was probably the last place of safety for her on the plains.

Back in South Africa, I played host to a man Rodney had met in Zambia, who dropped into the Lion Park for a visit at Rodney's invitation. As the unofficial tour guide, I showed the guy around the park and then I went into the enclosure with my buddies Tau and Napoleon. I was doing my usual stuff, rolling around on the ground with the boys, playing with their teeth and tongues and lying on top of them, but I could tell he was not amused.

In the next enclosure I went in with two lionesses I had known since cubs, Maditau and Tabby. The girls always played rough and while I was hugging Maditau, Tabby jumped up on my back. She wasn't meaning to hurt me, but she had her claws out. As well as ripping my shirt she nicked the back of my ear, and although it was not a deep cut, it was a typical head wound—it bled like crazy. Just like Napoleon and Tau have wildly different personalities, so do these two lionesses. Maditau became the best mother lion I have ever met. She's a classic beauty who has never had an unsuccessful
litter. Maditau is the responsible one who has no time for fooling around. Tabby, on the other hand, is a lion who's having too much fun in life for kids to ruin it for her. She's boisterous and voluptuous and, if she was a human, I think I would find her extremely sexy. She's sort of the Angelina Jolie of the lion world. She's the kind of lion who's always keen for some fun and games. For her, life's too short to let it pass by lazing under trees.

“Get out, get out!” the visitor started screaming at me. “You're bleeding! That lioness is going to kill you!”

I wiped the blood from the back of my ear and pushed her off me. “Relax, dude. She's not attacking me. This is one of my girls.”

The guy didn't believe me and he went to Rodney behind my back, saying, “This guy is crazy and he's going to get himself killed.” He asked Rodney if he was prepared to wear the bad publicity if Kevin was eaten by one of his tame lions. I'm sure the visitor from Zambia had the backing of other people at the Lion Park, and Rodney once more had to take me aside for a quiet chat.

“This is kind of hard for me, Kev,” Rodney began. “There is something I've been meaning to talk to you about for some time, so I'm just going to come right out and say it. The guy from Zambia says you are too rough with the lions and they are too rough with you. Maybe you should calm it down.”

I toned down my play with the lions when other people were around, but when it was just me, with Tau and Napoleon, or Maditau and Tabby, I would roll around on the ground and be a lion with them, the same as always. However, people were still watching me quietly from the wings, and a new debate began at the park about the need for us to carry a weapon, such as a gun or a shock stick, which is like an electric cattle prod. Pepper spray was also discussed, and while it can distract a lion, it's really about as effective as a strong breath freshener when a lion is in a frenzy.

For a while I was ordered to carry a gun, and I was given a monster .44 Magnum—similar to the weapon Clint Eastwood carried
in the
Dirty Harry
movies. I felt ridiculous and I looked like a Hollywood parody of a lion tamer. Also, its barrel was so long it started getting in the way when I was rolling around with the lions, sticking into their sides and mine. As an added concern, I genuinely didn't want to be seen walking around or getting into my car with this thing. Johannesburg has a bad enough problem with gun crime and people getting hijacked by car thieves. I didn't want to get stopped by bad guys one night and have them panic and start opening fire on me because they'd checked this cannon I was carrying. For a short while I switched to a snub-nosed .38 to keep everyone happy, but in the end I gradually stopped carrying it. It was a little like going into an enclosure with a stick, as the small caliber pistol would have been about as useful as a lump of wood against a full-grown lion in a feeding frenzy. As a final compromise I agreed to carry pepper spray, and that actually helped me save the lives of both a lion and a human later on in my career.

FOUR
 
The Clan

 

 

 

I walked into the clinic at Sunninghill in Johannesburg with my shirt covered in blood and my hand held to my nose. When the doctor moved my hand, most of my nose came away from my face

Just as in my childhood, I'm on first-name terms with the medicos and nurses at Sunninghill, and usually their first question when I walk in bleeding is “Lion or hyena, Kev?” More often than not the answer is hyena, as apart from motorcycle accidents (and the incident with the missing toe in the bicycle sprocket) these animals have inflicted the most serious injuries I've suffered in the course of my work. A hyena called Bongo was responsible for me almost losing my nose two months before my wedding to my beautiful wife, Mandy.

“This is going to hurt, Kev,” the doctor said to me, as he turned to the gleaming tray of sterile torture devices the nurse had prepared for him.