Managing the Lives of Others
When I visited the zoo as a kid I worked out that I didn’t like zoos. Today, some people would say that the Lion Park, and the facility where my lions now live, the Kingdom of the White Lion, are little more than zoos with large enclosures. I would disagree with that analysis.
There are some people who think that no wild animal should ever be enclosed, anywhere, no matter what the conditions, and that all animals should live in the wild. That’s a nice theory, but it becomes unworkable if you challenge the definitions of “enclosure,” “conditions,” and “the wild.”
In South Africa “the wild” doesn’t exist anymore. We have some fantastic national parks—the best in the world, I would say—yet they are finite areas that are either fenced or surrounded by physical features or human development that prevents the animals that live there from straying into the wider world.
The Kruger National Park, South Africa’s flagship reserve, is huge. It covers an area the size of Israel, and even though it has recently been extended across the border into Mozambique, forming what is now known as the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park, it is still an enclosure—albeit a big one. As soon as you enclose animals, and deny them traditional migration routes and the ability to roam endlessly, you have to start managing them. If you have too many animals in a lush part of the park with year-round water and good rainfall then you may have to lure some of those animals to drier parts of the park by building pumped waterholes. All of a sudden you start changing the natural makeup of an ecosystem.
As I have already mentioned, Kruger has a problem with elephants. As a finite area, the park can only sustain so many of these huge creatures, which consume huge amounts of food and water each day. Relocation of elephants to other reserves was tried, but proved not to be extremely successful. About six hundred elephants were transported across the border into the new Mozambican extension of the park, but most of them simply walked back to South Africa. Darting female elephants with contraceptives has proved to be a difficult management option. While numbers of elephants on the Mozambican side of the border have subsequently increased, culling, which was out of vogue because of local and international objections, is now back on the agenda as a part of the elephant management strategy.
Some people are against the domestication or training of animals. If everyone had always followed that line of thought, we wouldn’t have domestic cats or dogs today, or be farming sheep or cattle, or chickens, or goats, or riding horses. Some people say I shouldn’t be domesticating my lions, but I say that is rubbish. I enrich their lives and they do the same for me. In fact, every lion I’ve ever worked with has been domesticated in that it was conceived in captivity and born into captivity. I don’t support the capturing of wild lions and placing them in captivity, nor do I believe all the captive lions should be prevented from breeding and allowed to die out.
What angers me about the debate over animals in captivity is that it’s been hijacked by a small number of people at the extreme ends of the spectrum. The die-hard greenies want to end any form of captivity, and at the other end of the spectrum unethical hunters and keepers who are cruel to their animals have given anyone who keeps an animal captive a bad name. You can’t set all the captive animals free or eradicate everything in captivity—that’s a crock of shit. As I’ve said already, my contention is that there is no “wild” area in South Africa anyway, as even in the national parks animals have to be managed to suit the physical constraints.
Does a captive lion long to be roaming free in the wilds of the Serengeti or the Kruger National Park? This is a human perception, and in my opinion the answer is no. A lion knows what it knows. If you take a lion out of a hundred-acre enclosure and put him in a small cage, he may adapt to his new environment, but it will have a negative impact on him. The same goes for putting a human in jail.
On the other hand, I take my dog Valentino for drives and for walks in areas much bigger than the yard around my house and I do the same thing for my lions. Does exposing Valentino or the lions to bigger areas make them long to run wild? From what I can see, the answer to that, too, is no.
Lions exist in captivity for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is education. Even if I stopped working in television and film, I would still want to bring school groups to see my animals because I believe firmly in educating young people about the beauty and wonder of wildlife, and the problems facing animals in the wild. Some people would find it ironic that captive lions are needed to highlight the plight of wild ones, but many of the schoolchildren I’ve seen come through the Lion Park over the years would probably never get to see a lion in the wild in their lifetime. Despite its reputation as a wildlife Eden, South Africa is a very urbanized country with most poor people aspiring to a job and decent housing in a city or large town.
Lions are kept in captivity at facilities such as the Lion Park for tourism purposes. Not everyone who comes to Africa will have the time, the money, or the inclination to go to the bush, but they will probably want to see a lion. Zoos, too, keep lions as exhibits for educational and tourism reasons.
I see no problem with any of the above reasons for keeping lions in captivity as long as the lions are well cared for and happy. Of course, “happy” and “cared for” are subjective terms. I formed my views on these areas out of my experience first as a visitor, then as someone whose job it was to stimulate and enrich the lives of predators which, no matter your views on this, were destined to live their lives in captivity. What I have found is that my so-called unorthodox ways of relating to and working with lions and other predators have helped me come up with some new, different, and I believe better ways of managing captive animals.
I’ve noticed over the years that if visitors perceive your animals are happy then they probably are happy.
Take space, for example. The perception in most people’s minds is that an animal in a small enclosure is going to be unhappy, which may or may not be true. For me, if I see an animal pacing up and down the fence of its enclosure, whether his cage is four meters by four meters or twenty-five hectares, then I believe there is something wrong.
Lions are funny creatures. A male lion is happy if he has water, food, and sex. If he’s happy, it’s also highly likely that he will spend most of his time sitting in one spot. One of my white lions, Thor, has a twenty-five-hectare enclosure and he sits in one spot, day after day, under his favorite tree. When the sun shifts and he starts to get hot, he gets up and moves to the shady side of the tree. This is similar behavior to a wild male lion, although they have work to do, patrolling their territory. To simulate this, and to give them some exercise, I rotate the animals between different enclosures. When I move a lion into an enclosure that’s been occupied by hyenas, or even other lions, he will spend time running around marking his territory and sniffing about. It’s something to keep him interested. Once he’s satisfied that he’s staked his claim, he’ll sit under a tree quite happily.
We also exercise the lions and take them for walks in the open areas of the park. Once, the lions got more exercise than we expected. Three of us, Helga, a fantastic keeper from the Lion Park whom I call the mother of all cubs because of the number she has raised; Alex the trainer; and I took Thunder and Rain for a walk one day. We left their enclosure and went out in the greater fenced area, where there were wildebeest, zebras, giraffes, impalas, and other harmless game.
This was a new initiative and I suppose some of the others at the park were a bit wary. However, I wanted to enrich the lions by showing them new and bigger areas.
Thunder was talking to me and I was answering him back in lion and in human. “Hello, my boy. You’re loving this, aren’t you?”
Thunder stopped and raised his nose. He started sniffing. I looked in the direction from which the breeze was coming, across the open plain of gently waving golden grass. On the horizon was a small herd of grazing wildebeest. Thunder was staring intently at them.
“Check,” I said to Helga and Alex, nodding to the lion and the strange creatures that had caught his interest.
Alex shook his head. “No way. These two will never catch a wildebeest. Look at Thunder, he’s unfit, and those wildebeest will take off before these two get anywhere near them.”
People—these people who know all about lions—say you can’t reintroduce a tame lion in to the wild and teach it to hunt. I looked back at Thunder and he had gone into stealth mode, lowering his tawny body into the matching grass. He was slinking forward. Who had taught him to behave like this? He’d been raised in captivity and never hunted a single thing in his life. Nor had his mother or father, for that matter. This was innate, instinctive behavior.
“Look at Rain,” Helga said.
She seemed to be getting in on the act, as well, and had speared off in a classic flanking maneuver, or so we thought.
“Zebra,” I said, following Rain’s path and eyes. “It’s got a foal with it.” Rain clearly had her sights set on different prey and the foal was, I thought, an easier target.
“Thunder!” I hissed. “What are you doing, boy?” He moved a hundred meters ahead of us, through the grass, then broke cover. Breathless, we watched as he charged into the group of unsuspecting wildebeest. They, too, had led a very sheltered life, but they scattered as though their lives depended on it—and they did. Thunder carved a path across the veld as he charged. Through the dust cloud thrown up by galloping hooves, we saw Thunder again. He leapt on to the back of a hapless wildebeest and pulled it down. Within seconds he had his jaws clamped hard around its throat as its hooves flailed at the air.
Thunder killed that thing as though he had done it every day of his life.
Perhaps emboldened by her mate, Rain charged after the zebra. She closed in on the foal, but at the last minute some instinct of its own made the young zebra turn suddenly. Rain tried to follow its track and reached out one massive paw to hook the zebra’s hind leg with her claw, but she missed—just. She lost her balance and fell, but was on her feet and crankily shaking the grass and dust from her coat straight after.
The area we were walking in was huge—about two hundred hectares—and the wildebeest and zebra are wild (that is, they have not been hand-reared) so they had a fair chance of escaping Thunder and Rain. I do believe that if we had let Rain try again she would have caught something, but the Lion Park does not work that way, and that was the end of the experiment of walking lions in the greater park with other game.
Food is an important part of the management of any animal in captivity. At the Lion Park, and in The Kingdom of the White Lion, where my lions now live, we rely heavily on donations from farmers who have lost large animals through natural causes.
We collect dead cows, horses, and pigs, and will shoot animals that need to be euthanized. We don’t take animals that have been put down with drugs by a vet because the Lion Park learned the hard way early on that residual chemicals in the flesh of a euthanized animal can kill a cub. Adult lions just get stoned, but it’s not good for them. We provide a good service for farmers, who would otherwise have to pay significant sums of money to dispose of dead livestock.
One school of thought in keeping captive lions is that they should be overfed. Some owners believe that a lion with a full belly will be happy and less likely to try and eat a keeper, or escape in search of human or animal prey. I always believed that this was nonsense, and set out to prove that contentment had little to do with being stuffed with food.
Different people I spoke to had different theories about how much lions ate. The most common blanket statement was that a male lion ate 35 kilograms (77 pounds) of meat per week, and a female between 15 and 20 kilograms.
I have always been an astute observer and a meticulous record-keeper. I find I can never have too much information about the animals in my care. No one at the Lion Park could tell me exactly how much the lions were eating. People were guessing and various numbers kept coming up, but no one knew for sure. This was like a red rag to a bull to me.
I began a strict regime of observation and record-keeping. Over the course of a year, I worked out that a large male lion, such as Thor the white lion, was eating an average total of about 20 kilograms (44 pounds) per week, usually in two sittings. We were feeding twice a week because it would have been quite a chore to cut and prepare meals for all the lions on a daily basis, and because this mimics the frequency with which a lion would feed in the wild.
Over the next year I began experimenting with Thor’s food intake, sometimes increasing it and sometimes decreasing it. What I was trying to work out was the correct average intake of food that would allow Thor to maintain a healthy, stable, average weight without losing condition and without detrimental changes to his behavior. It’s quite easy to tell when lions are losing weight and condition, as it shows quickly on their hips and ribs, and their hair starts taking on a fuzzy feel and look.
What I found was that Thor needed 17 kilograms (37.4 pounds) of meat per week, which was less than what we had been feeding him and well short of the 35-kilogram minimum portion per week that other people had talked about. I don’t think that lions should be kept overweight simply because some people think this makes them less dangerous. No one wants to see a fat lion on a film set, but that wasn’t my motivation for experimenting with Thor’s diet. I wanted a content, healthy lion in top condition, and that’s what I got. I hope that this fact, at least, puts an end to the claims that the only reason I can go into my lions’ enclosures and interact with them is because they are overfed. I’ll also quite happily go in and play with a lion a minute before he is due to receive his regular feeding. They do not see me as food and their contentment has little to do with being stuffed.
My special relationships with my animals means that managing them on a day-to-day basis is much easier for me than any zookeeper trying to care for his charges anywhere else in the world.
Keeping an enclosure clean is very important, and when it’s time for cleaners to come in, I can call my lions and move them all into their night pen. I know from experience that when you try to move a pride of “wild” lions—ones that you can’t approach up close—into a cage, one will always resist. Cleaner enclosures mean less flies and disease, but if my lions do develop a problem with flies, I can put ointment straight onto their ears. Not many other keepers could do that without darting the lions.
If my lions get worms, I can walk up to them and give them de-worming medicine. Likewise, to prevent ticks I pour the treatment onto their shoulders individually. If I do find a stray tick, I can just pick it off. De-ticking lions that are not used to people walking up close to them is difficult. The cats have to be driven into a type of crush and then sprayed, which they hate. If one of my lions needs antibiotics, I can give it to him personally, out of my hand, and make sure he has taken it.
Once Napoleon and Tau had a fight, as lions do, and Tau gave Napoleon a really nasty gash in the pad on one of his paws. I called the vet, and when she came to the enclosure she asked if I could show her the wound while Napoleon was still conscious. Because of the relationship I have with Napoleon, I was able to lead him, hobbling, to the gate, pick up his paw, and show it to the doctor while she stood on the other side of the fence.
“It’s bad, but I can’t stitch it,” the vet said. “It’s not like we can put a bandage on it and say, ‘Hey, Napoleon, be sure and stay off the paw for a few days.’ He’ll chew the bandage off as soon as we put it on him.”
Instead, she asked me if I could dip his paw twice a day in a bucket of water and Hibiscrub, the anti-bacterial soap that surgeons use to wash their hands before operating. After that, I should put cream on the wound and give him an antibiotic pill.
“Sure. No problem,” I said, wondering if she believed me.
Napoleon was in pain, but he let me do exactly as the doctor ordered, and even I thought, “Wow, this is special.” It got to the stage where he would come hobbling down to the gate when he saw me coming. It must have hurt him each time he put his paw in the bucket, but he knew it was doing him good and that I wasn’t trying to cause him pain. That’s the relationship I have with Napoleon, but I don’t know if Tau would have been as patient a patient.
As I’ve said before, Tau is a different lion. It is not as though I have a better relationship with Napoleon, it’s just different. Tau is just a less trusting and more skittish individual than Napoleon. Napoleon is relaxed and chilled and very confident. Just like two human brothers can be different, so too can lion brothers be different, one from the other. And, of course, this can cause problems. Tau and Napoleon needed to be microchipped for identification purposes, and while I can do a lot with those two lions without anesthetic or the need for other people to be around, sticking a big fat needle loaded with a microchip into either of their shoulders would have earned me a bite. In some cases, even with my special lions, there is sometimes no alternative to sedating them so that certain procedures and treatments can be done.
I had to get a vet involved. I arranged for Dr. Paul Bartells to come and do the chipping, and to get some DNA samples from the two lions while he was there. Dr. Bartells is a well-respected veterinary surgeon who has compiled a DNA bank of lions across South Africa for research purposes. The plan was for him to take a small tissue sample from each lion’s ear while they were under.
Paul prepared a couple of tranquilizer darts and loaded the dart guns. I don’t like putting my lions to sleep, but sometimes it has to be done. He took aim at Napoleon from outside the fence of the enclosure, took a breath, and squeezed the trigger. The dart hit him in the rump and he went down like a sack of potatoes. Paul reloaded and fired at my other lion. While the dart found its mark, Tau seemed very resilient to the drug. He staggered, walked around a bit, sat down, but then got up again. For some reason the dose just wasn’t taking effect.
“I’ll give him another shot,” said Paul.
I nodded, my concern growing. He fired another dart and said, “That should do it, but let’s go start working on Napoleon or else he’s going to wake up soon.”
I agreed, against my better judgment. Tau was woozy, but he still looked too alert for my liking. He was probably pissed off, as well, as he had just had two darts in his butt. However, as luck would have it, Tau was at the far end of the enclosure and Napoleon had dropped right by us, near the gate. We decided to go in—Paul, his female assistant, and me.
No sooner had we slid open the gate, kneeled down by Napoleon, and started to work on him than a couple of onlookers outside the enclosure began shouting.
“Look out!” one cried. “Tau’s getting up!”
All three of us turned. Tau had seen us messing with his brother and he was not happy. He charged and we got up and ran for the gate. Tau was about fifty yards from us and we were about five from the gate.
Paul and I bundled his assistant through the gate and she made it to safety. Paul was next at the gate and I was behind him, but Tau was still bounding towards us. Although he had received two doses of tranquilizing drug, Tau covered the distance between us quicker than Paul and I could get through the gate.
Tau reared up and lunged at Paul. Tau had bypassed me, even though I was the closer target, but he locked his jaws around the vet’s arm and all I could hear was a crunch, like someone biting into a crisp, juicy apple.
Tau hooked his claws into Paul’s buttocks and started trying to drag him down and back into the enclosure. At the same time, the doctor’s assistant and the other people outside the enclosure had hold of Paul and were trying to drag him to safety. Poor Paul was at risk of being pulled apart, and I was terrified that Tau was going to tear Paul’s arm off.
I didn’t have pepper spray with me on that day, so I did all I could think of to make Tau release the vet. I reached around Tau’s huge head and jammed two fingers of one hand into the lion’s nostrils. I drove the fingers of my other hand up under Tau’s jaw and pressed hard, blocking his airway.
Tau gasped, and that momentary pause, during which he released his bite on Paul’s arm, allowed the people outside to drag the bleeding man to safety. I, however, was still in the enclosure with an enraged, drugged lion. He didn’t know who I was anymore, or what I was doing to him, or why I was doing it. He started coming after me so I ran back inside the enclosure. I must have looked like a rodeo clown being chased by an enraged bull, though I was running at the same pace as an Olympic sprinter doing the one hundred meters. I ran in a complete circuit of the enclosure with Tau bounding after me.
I was heading towards the exit, but blocking my way was a waterhole which must have been about two meters wide. With Tau gaining on me I decided to try and jump the waterhole, but as I left the bank I tripped and landed face-first in the water.
The funny thing was that as I tripped, Tau also stumbled, in perfect synchronicity with me. I guess the drug was finally starting to take effect on his coordination. If he hadn’t fallen when he did, then my beloved, stoned lion probably would have munched and clawed me. The difference between Tau and Tsavo was that my boy had a full set of claws. I splashed through the water, thoroughly soaked, and made it back to the gate in quick time while Tau, finally, passed out behind me.
Paul was airlifted to hospital by a medical evacuation helicopter, and he received somewhere between a hundred and two hundred stitches to repair his mangled arm. It took him more than a year to recover and to this day he still can’t extend his arm fully. He’s quite a guy, though, and certainly hasn’t let that stop him. He flies microlight aircraft, like me, is the head of the National Zoo’s Wildlife Biological Resource Center, and won the National Science and Technology Forum Award. To this day, though, I think he might be secretly proudest of the fact that one day he was mangled by a lion and lived to tell the story.
I saw a saying above a guy’s computer one day which read: “Engage brain before putting mouth into gear.” I think that’s a good philosophy to follow with humans. I’ve found that it’s an even better philosophy to follow when I look at a lion and think about how he’s being treated. Before I make an assumption about a lion or take a step towards him, I try to take all the facts I know into account. For instance, I have seen lions in captivity that appeared to me to be unhappy. However, I don’t really know what’s in that lion’s head, as he lives behind the bars of his cage and I don’t know the relationship that lion has to its keeper. By the same token, most people don’t really understand the relationship I have with my lions and that creates disagreements among us. Both that keeper and I have different relationships with our lions. Maybe I can explain how I think about a lion, and in doing so give you an idea of how I approach and manage all the big cats I work with.
First off, I don’t have the same relationship with all of my lions that I do with Napoleon, and I constantly try to keep in mind that all animals are individuals. Tau and Napoleon, for instance, are brothers, but like all brothers they fight sometimes, and that affects the way that they interact with me. Like people, we must understand that even animals related through birth can have very different personalities, and we must also remember that they go through different stages in their lives. Just like us, they can have good days and bad days. Many factors can affect the relationship, such as the way I happened to be getting on with one or more of the pride males at the time, or the way that a mom with a new litter of cubs eyes me.
Second, the amount of time that I know a lion can also affect my relationship with it. For instance, there is a group of lions that I call “acquaintance lions,” lions that I don’t know as well as my own lions. I will work with them, but I am more careful. Things can change with time, though. An acquaintance lion can become a good friend. Problems that might have existed between us might just have been related to age, for instance.
That brings up a third point: the age of the lion. As Tsavo and others have taught me, relationships with lions can become a bit sticky between the ages of two and three. Lions that I don’t see eye to eye with at this age can become great friends of mine at five. By the same token, some animals I’ve been friendly with at that earlier age don’t get on with me as they get older. When lions hit the equivalent of puberty, they change, and that can manifest itself in their behavior with lions younger and older than them. Just like I ran wild when I was a young man, so can they, and I keep that in mind when I’m with them. From a management point of view, it’s about understanding these changes, and being aware of what else is going on around the animals. For instance, if I move some sexy young lady lions in next door to Thor, he might not want to know me for a while. It’s not rocket science. When I was an adolescent, if a sexy young girl had moved in next door to me, I pretty much would have wanted my mom, say, to keep her distance, if I ever got the chance to talk to the new neighbor. Some keepers, though, wouldn’t consider their own human experiences to understand a change in a lion’s behavior. And that, I think, is a big mistake.
It must be terrible, I think, for lions introduced into a zoo to hear the strange calls of all the other animals around them and not be able to see or interact with others of their species. Think of how you might feel, dropped down in the middle of a country where you didn’t speak the language and were all alone. You’d be just like those lions. They’re the ones you see pacing up and down in their cages. They’re “wild” animals that are being kept in captivity. By wild, I mean they are unable to interact with humans, and only see them as something either to fear or to hate. They don’t know whether to be aggressive or submissive towards their keepers. My lions aren’t wild. They know me, they know their surroundings, and it makes life easier for all of us.
Part of the problem with a troubled captive lion is that it may have been hand-raised as a cub and exposed to humans when it was little and cute. I believe that cubs that get this sort of attention are enriched and contented animals. They play until they get tired and then they fall asleep. In the wild, they get similar attention from the rest of the pride and are allowed to exhaust themselves with play. In captivity, there usually comes a point when the cub is withdrawn from public contact, because it has reached a certain size, and never interacts with a human again on friendly terms for the rest of its life. It’s no wonder they seem troubled. I wish it was different. I wish that those people who cared for the cubs would keep up the relationship, even in a different form, when those cubs grew. Staff in zoos and other Lion Parks come and go, but just as I try to understand my lions as individuals, so have I made a commitment to them that they will be looked after, even if I am not around.
Starting at birth, there are two ways to manage captive lion cubs—they can either be left with their mothers or taken away and hand-raised.
Leaving a lioness to raise her cubs, in the presence of the pride males, means visitors can see a whole pride together, which is a nice experience. It also saves money, because hand-raising a cub costs about R6000 ($800) per animal. You can tell the difference when a cub is fed on mother’s milk—it grows faster, it’s more solid, and its fur is in great condition.
Traditionally, though, the problem with leaving a lioness to raise her cubs is that the young ones grow up “wild”—that is, not exposed to humans from a young age. This is because conventional wisdom had it that a human could never go anywhere near a lioness and her cubs. Lionesses were so fiercely protective that they would kill anyone who tried to spend time with their cubs. In the wild, young males are forced to leave the pride once they reach an age of between eighteen and twenty-six months. If they stayed, they would be killed by the dominant pride male. The same thing happens in captivity, but the downside is that if the males have been raised “wild” then humans can never work with them.
Removing cubs at birth means that they could be raised around humans, meaning they might be available for, say, film work later in life. However, a lioness who loses her cubs goes straight back into estrus, so taking them away may mean more cubs to deal with—at more cost—a little more than three months later. Space becomes a factor, as well, because creating more and more lion enclosures is a costly business.
A better model for raising cubs was staring me in the face, but people said it couldn’t be done. What if we could have the best of both worlds—cubs being raised by their mother, but with me allowed to go in with them while they were still small, to habituate them to humans and form relationships with them? I thought that if Tau or Napoleon could mate with Maditau, one of the female cubs who had been born about six months after my boys, and I could get Maditau to accept me around her babies, then we would solve a number of issues. The cubs would grow up healthy and strong; they would get used to me from the start of their lives; the Lion Park would save on hand-raising costs; Maditau would not go into estrus and breed again; and visitors would get to see a whole pride in action.
Further down the track, the male cubs could be separated from the pride once they came of age—and I had already formed a relationship with them—and the female cubs could stay with the pride, on the contraceptive pill, so Tau and Napoleon would be unable to mate with them, as these lions would be their daughters.
In the wild, the problem of fathers mating with daughters is usually solved by the fact that by the time female cubs are sexually mature, the pride males have been kicked out by new, unrelated males. However, in areas that are over-hunted or heavily poached, dominant males may stay in charge longer, and eventually mate with their daughters, causing problems with interbreeding. Likewise, if the dominant male is killed off too soon by a hunter, younger males can end up mating with their siblings and even mothers and aunts.
The idea of interacting with cubs while they were still with their mothers sounded good in theory, but would a lioness let me get near her cubs? And, more important, would even I be crazy enough to try?