Bond of Brothers
England was dire. I hated it.
I did some bar work and some work in a CD warehouse, which I soon discovered wasn’t for me. Although I checked out a few of the local gyms, the only work they had on offer was personal training, which was something that did not interest me. It was dark when I woke up in the morning and pitch black in the afternoons. In between it was gray.
I was staying in a crummy little part of London near the Kensington Olympia tube station. I lived in a dark, dingy apartment that you had to walk downstairs from the street to access. When I went to look at the place, the first thing that struck me was the smell of damp. I ended up sharing a bedroom with two other guys, while in the room next to us were three or four Italian girls. There was only one bathroom and a small kitchen for all of us, and to get any space to myself I had to go outside into the cold. My share of the rent to live in this squalor was about eighty British pounds a week and this sapped up most of what I was earning. At first I thought I could get my head around living in London, in that place, but then I realized it was simply horrific. I wanted out, but my South African mates in the UK urged me to hang in and wait for the summer, which they said would be glorious.
“I don’t live my life waiting for summer. I live for now,” I told them. They were probably right about me having a change of heart if I waited until the comparatively warmer weather, but after two months I was broke and miserable, so I came home. It’s funny how the decisions one makes can change one’s life. If I had gone to England in the summer and found that I loved it, I might have stayed and found a job that I liked, but I would never have met Rodney Fuhr, a guy who was to play a huge part in my life.
Stepping out of the terminal at what was then still known as Jan Smuts International Airport, it was good to see the sun again and feel the warm humid cloak of Africa in the summer bringing me back to life. Many South Africans, including my brother, live abroad. Some leave Africa because of the crime problem in our country, which is bad, while others pursue better pay or a better future for their children. I suspect many of them miss Africa, problems and all, and would come back in a heartbeat if they could. I was happy to be home and it was nice to see a blue sky again after the weeks of drab gray and cold winter rain. I’d also taken the space we have in Africa for granted—having room to move and not having to live in other people’s pockets was something to savor.
I went back to my job as an exercise physiologist at the gym and things started looking up. Mom had met another guy and moved out of the town house, so I had the place to myself. I had a new girlfriend, Michelle, and with the money I was making I bought my first motorcycle—a Kawasaki ZX7 Ninja superbike—and started riding a lot on the weekends, but I revisited my youth one day on the way to work by riding into a pool of spilled diesel while wearing only a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I was covered in abrasions and ended up as one big walking scab. It was bloody painful.
Rodney Fuhr had come to the gym for some work on his knee and I’m sure he wasn’t happy about being lumped with me. Rodney is a guy who likes to know he is getting the best when he deals with people. As with my other clients, I started by interviewing Rodney about his knee problem, then weighing him, measuring his height, calculating his body fat, and assessing his fitness. He was five-eight, with graying, curly hair and a moustache, and olive-colored skin. For a man in his late fifties I thought he was in pretty good shape. He seemed a quietly spoken person, perhaps not comfortable around too many strangers, and he may have resented being lumped with a youngster like me, instead of the boss. We didn’t talk much at all during his first few sessions, apart from what he was meant to be doing exercise-wise. During this time I developed an exercise regime for him and helped him work his knee and gradually strengthen the muscles around it. I did learn, however, that he was a successful businessman who owned the Supermart chain of clothing and general goods stores in South Africa.
I was hand-raising a Cape White-eye at the time, a tiny little bird which had fallen out of its nest during one of the violent storms that rock the Highveld at the start of the summer wet season. The gym’s gardener had brought it in to me.
“Baas, I don’t know what to do with this thing,” the gardener said, cupping the little chick in his big calloused hands and presenting it to me. Even at work and in adulthood, my reputation as the bird man had followed me from Orange Grove. I raised the white-eye until it fledged, and once he was flying he would still come to me, fluttering into the gym from outside when I called him.
As Rodney pushed his leg against my hands, using resistance to strengthen his leg, the barriers between us started to drop. Rodney asked me about the bird and my love of animals, and I found out that he was incredibly passionate about wildlife, especially lions. Rodney had used part of his wealth to sponsor a lion research camp in the Savuti area of Botswana’s Chobe National Park in the late seventies and eighties.
Savuti is a starkly barren, scorching, sandy part of Africa that plays host to a seasonal visitation of zebra and wildebeest that provides an annual feast for the area’s lions. Because of the prevalence of huge herds of elephant in the area, the lions there have also learned to hunt these huge creatures. I’d seen wildlife documentaries, such as Dereck Joubert’s Eternal Enemies, about interactions between lions and hyenas in Savuti, without realizing that the man whose knee I was working on had once been Joubert’s employer. Rodney had also funded research by Chris McBride, and other well-known figures in the world of African mammal study. Rodney had apparently given Dereck Joubert his first break in filming wildlife documentaries, and while Joubert has gone on to become a famous filmmaker, he and Rodney had fallen out over a difference of opinion about a particular film project which later was to have a huge impact on my life.
Rodney had always wanted to make a dramatic feature film based on the life of a lion, using footage shot in the wild. Some of the people he had funded had also been tasked with filming for documentaries and the feature film project. Rodney had learned, however, that some scenes were simply too difficult to film using wild animals, and he had visited the Lion Park in Johannesburg to organize footage of lion cubs. The research camp was an expensive business and Rodney admitted he had overextended himself by buying more and more equipment—including more than one aircraft—for his researchers and filmmakers. His business had suffered and he had withdrawn from the camp and shelved his movie project.
When I met Rodney, he was rebuilding his business empire. One day in 1998 he walked into the gym with a smile on his face. “Guess what, Kev? The Lion Park has come up for auction and we bid. Guess what? We bought it!” Rodney was looking to start a new research camp in Zambia, to the north of Botswana and Zimbabwe, and was talking about acquiring land there. To complement the footage captured on film in the wild, he now had a handy collection of “extras”—lions and various other mammal species at a well-established tourist attraction on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It turned out that Rodney also had a sentimental attachment to the Lion Park as he had met his wife, Ilana, there.
“You should come visit the lions, anytime,” Rodney said to me during our regular session.
I wasn’t sure if he was serious, though I know now that even though Rodney is a successful man, he loves sharing his stuff with other people who share his passions. If he has an aircraft and he finds out you love flying then he’ll insist you take his plane up. If you enjoy it, he’s happy. As it happened, through a mate at the gym I also knew the new manager Rodney had appointed to the park, Richard, whom Rodney had met through a friend of mine in South Africa.
Most of my clients were working people who preferred to schedule their gym appointments for early morning or late afternoon, outside of work hours, so I had most of the day free. I decided to take Rodney up on his offer and one day I took the R512 out of Johannesburg to Muldersdrift. I’d been there once as a kid, and was surprised at how close to the city the park now seemed to be. I’d remembered it back in the day as being in the middle of nowhere. It probably was, back then, but by this time the suburban sprawl was reaching its tentacles around it. Even so, the park was a big chunk of land. From the road I could see wildebeest grazing.
In the car park and reception area was a mix of local families and foreign tourists who had come to interact with the cubs and see Africa’s king of the beasts up close through their car windows. I met Richard and he took me away from the main enclosures to show me some lion cubs that Rodney had insisted I visit.
The first were a couple of females, who were still tiny at three weeks. They were in a box and they were incredibly cute. Further along on my private tour we came to another enclosure containing two older cubs. At six or seven months they had reached an age where they could no longer be petted by human visitors to the park, and they were big—much bigger than I had expected. One was called Napoleon and the other, which had yet to be christened, had the most incredible clear eyes.
Conventional wisdom—or perhaps superstition—among lion keepers, I later learned, was that one should never trust a lion with clear eyes. Like a lot of things people told me about lions over the years to come, and conventional wisdom in general, that little gem turned out to be bullshit.
I had no way of knowing it at the time, but these two young lions were to become my best friends—my brothers.
Richard gave me a briefing before I entered the enclosure with Napoleon and his unnamed brother.
“Don’t look them in the eye.
“Don’t turn your back on them.
“Don’t crouch or kneel, or they will climb up on your back.
“Don’t run.
“Don’t make any sudden movements.
“Don’t scream. Talk quietly.”
It was a long list of things to remember not to do, but I was going in with Richard and I had confidence in his experience. He’s a tall guy, and big, and I didn’t really do much during that first visit. I petted them, cautiously, and even though they were young, they were very big and quite intimidating. I suppose I was like most visitors to the Lion Park back then. I thought, “Wow, what an experience,” but after it was over my life had to go on. It had been a great day and I was, I think, a little sad to realize that life did, in fact, actually have to go on.
When I next saw Rodney I told him about the visit. “I went to the park and, man, those cubs are so adorable.”
Rodney could see that the visit had touched me. “Well, you must go again. Spend more time with them. Go as often as you want, every day if you like.”
He was ecstatic simply to learn that I had enjoyed myself by visiting the place he’d just bought. He didn’t need to make the offer twice, and I started visiting more often. For the first month I visited about twice a week. I would go and meet up with Richard and he would take me on a different behind-the-scenes visit each time. When I saw the grown lions being fed a horse’s leg I had my first close-up view of the feeding frenzy that can overtake a big cat, and the way they rip their prey apart with their claws and use the spiky papillae on their tongues to lick the skin from the meat and separate flesh from bone. It was fascinating.
Richard told me that a fully grown male could weigh between 180 and 250 kilograms—up to 550 pounds. In the wild, young males left their family, or pride, at the age of about two. When they reached maturity they would seek to take on a pride of their own. I learned that contrary to popular belief, male lions often play an active part in hunting and this is not just left to the females. I wondered what it would be like to get close enough to one of these huge beasts to run my hands through its long dark mane.
In Camp One at the Lion Park visitors can drive their own vehicles on a road through the lions’ enclosure. At the time I first started visiting the park I was driving an Opel Kadett, a compact little car. I stopped to take a look at some lions lazing under a tree and a huge male got up and wandered slowly towards me through the yellow grass. I swallowed hard and felt my heart start to beat faster as he closed the distance between us. I don’t think I had truly realized just how big a lion was until that moment. His beautiful maned head was higher than the roof of my car and he looked down at me through the window.
When he roared, the car vibrated. It was like the scene in the movie Jurassic Park where the Tyrannosaurus Rex is breathing on the people in the four-by-four. It was awesome, in the truest sense of the word.
After about a month of my visiting the park on a regular basis, Richard let me go into the enclosure with Napoleon and his clear-eyed brother alone. When I walked in through the gate by myself I thought those two lion cubs were going to kill me. The still-unnamed one was feisty. He would stare at me with his piercing, pitiless eyes and then launch himself at me, biting and mauling me with his claws and paws, which were already the size of saucers. I thought, “Shit, this thing wants to chow me!” Now I know that rather than wanting to eat me, he was simply playing.
If this was play, though, it was roughhouse stuff. When the clear-eyed one locked his jaws on my hand and started biting down with those needle-like teeth of his, it felt like he was going to rip my hand off. I think my attitude towards these two lions was that as much as I loved seeing them and being with them, I didn’t want to impose on them. I felt I simply had to wait, and grin and bear their ripping and biting until they tired of it.
“Shit, Richard, is this safe?” I asked him one day as I inspected a fresh set of scratches and my ripped shirt. I had started buying my shirts from the Mr. Price discount shop by this stage, as I was going through about one a week.
“I don’t know, Kev,” he said.
“Great,” I thought, “and you’re the expert. Just great.” Richard was probably no more expert in the keeping of captive lions than I was at that time.
Richard kept going into the enclosure with the two young lions so I, as someone who can never resist a challenge, kept going in, as well. I have to admit that I was a little concerned, as despite what some of my friends and family say, I don’t really have a death wish.
“You’d better give that one with the clear eyes a name,” Richard said to me one day as I inspected the rips in my latest cheap shirt. I’d gone through a brief phase of wearing overalls when I was with the lions, but it had been too hot so I’d resigned myself to more trips to Mr. Price.
I wasn’t sure if he was serious about naming the lion, so I ran it past Rodney during his next session at the gym. Rodney was clearly pleased that I was enjoying spending time with the lions, but as the cats did, in fact, belong to him, I asked for his permission. He told me it would be his pleasure for me to name the lion.
I didn’t want to name him something corny, like Savuti or Serengeti. After many hours of thought I came up with the name Tau, which means lion in the Tswana language. Clearly, I was getting a little more sophisticated than the days when I named my frog. I thought it was a good, strong, original name, and I was proud. Only later did I learn that practically every second safari lodge and camp in southern Africa has the word Tau in its name.
Rodney mentioned to me during a session in the gym that too many of his senior staff at Supermart were unfit, overweight, or out of shape. He asked me if I would be interested in going on the payroll, working part of my day as a private trainer for him and his staff, with the rest of the day free for me to spend at the Lion Park.
I didn’t particularly like private training and had deliberately shied away from working in that field when I was England, but the arrangement Rodney proposed was interesting. For a start, it would allow me to give him something back, and to formalize my by now daily visits to his lions. I was spending more and more time with Tau and Napoleon. I now realized I was developing a close relationship with the fast-growing cubs, one of whom I had named. I had also named the two females I’d seen on the day I first met my boys. I called them Maditau and Tabby.
After Tau and Napoleon had tired of biting and scratching me, I would sit in the enclosure with them for two or three hours a day, just watching them. I didn’t set out to break the accepted rules of lion keeping, but I found that the rule about not sitting or crouching around the lions was causing problems, not least of all with my wardrobe. It seemed to me that when they jumped up and started clawing me, they were trying to drag me down to their level. After some play closer to the ground they would eventually tire of attacking me and we’d sit calmly in the grass near each other, but not touching.
As we sat there, I began to think about them, how they were alike and how they were different. Napoleon seemed like a long-lost brother trapped in a lion’s body, my soul mate. He’s regal, confident, and ruggedly good-looking with an extremely compassionate disposition. He’s the kind of lion who will do things without putting too much thought into it. Sound familiar? Tau was also a soul mate of a different sort. He’s a lion who was not as well liked by people in his younger years because of his tricky personality. I knew that all he needed was some understanding, patience, and love. Tau is a lion unsure of people’s intentions, and therefore always a little more reserved. He won’t just jump into the fire. His shy nature, contrasted with his crystal clear eyes, is what intrigues people about him. When Tau’s in a bad mood, unlike Napeoleon, you can change it. He needs time, just like I do when I’m in a bad mood; I hate nothing more than someone thinking they can fix it for me. Tau takes a while to get his temper up, but when he does, don’t get in his way. He’ll kill you now and ask questions later.
When Rodney found out exactly how much time I was spending at the park, he offered to pay me for my time there as well as the private training. There were management changes happening at the same time and I think he also needed someone on the staff that he knew. I was employed as an animal welfare and animal enrichment worker, which basically meant my job was to help manage the animals, as well as look for ways to keep them occupied and content in captivity. To be honest, I wasn’t totally sure what my job title meant, but I knew it included being around Tau and Napoleon, so I was happy. I’d still been working with my other clients at the gym in the afternoons, but the new arrangement meant I was training Rodney’s staff in the mornings and then spending my afternoons at the Lion Park.
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.