Cheeky Cheetahs and Jealous Jackals
Voluptuousness is a quality prized in some African cultures. A woman who is well rounded—all around—is considered attractive to many African men. Lenny the cheetah was an all-African male.
When I finished my morning coffee at the Lion Park I met up with the latest crop of volunteers. The park, like several other African wildlife, educational, and charitable organizations, accepts volunteer workers from abroad. They tend to be backpackers who have a bit of extra time to spend on the continent, and want to contribute something.
This group was pretty typical. There were about half a dozen of them and they hailed from all around the world. Holland, Germany, and Italy were represented, and there was an Australian and a New Zealander. This group was all pretty young, and mostly women, but the age range varied enormously, from kids just out of school on their gap year through to people in their seventies.
After I took them in with the lion cubs, I made them wait outside the big lions’ enclosure while I went in and did my stuff with Tau and Napoleon. As usual, I toned down my play in the presence of strangers, as I had learned from Tsavo that animals can react very differently when there is an audience at hand. I went in with a plastic atomizer bottle and I sprayed some of the liquid near the lions’ huge, hairy faces. The boys sniffed the air and rubbed against me, urging me to spray more.
“What’s that spray?” the Aussie girl asked, preempting my explanation.
“It’s a mix of water, citronella, and other goodies. Cats love scents and this stuff is like catnip for lions. They like to sniff it and rub it.” To further demonstrate, I sprayed some on the grass and Napoleon lowered his massive body to the ground and began rolling in it. We left the boys and I went in with some of my other lions—Siam, Kaiser, and Gandalf, one of my white lions. Kaiser loves the spray, and was pushing his shaggy head against me to get some more of it while the volunteers watched and took photos from outside the enclosure fence.
“What would happen if one of us went in there with you?” asked a young German guy.
It’s a good question, and it always comes up. “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “Lions can smell fear and the adrenaline coursing through your body. If you walked in confidently and showed no sign of fear, you might be okay. Or this lion could decide he didn’t like you and he could charge into you, go for your stomach or throat, put you on the ground, and kill you.”
Now that I was sure I had their attention, I continued the explanation. “I’ve known all these lions since they were born. I haven’t hand-raised them all, but I’ve spent time with them, and I have a relationship with them. They’re between two and three years old—roughly equivalent to the teen years in humans, so some of them have an attitude. I know them, so I can relate to them, but if a stranger comes in with them, it’s like, say, if your parents had split up when you were young. If your father suddenly reappears in your life when you’re a teen, you might tolerate him, or you might think he’s an idiot and you’d like to smack him for thinking he can just drop in and out of your life.”
The volunteers were nodding. It’s an analogy I often use, because lions, like people, are unpredictable. I then went on to explain the differences between my family, friends, and acquaintance classifications for my animals. “That one over there,” I said, pointing to a lion I have a healthy respect for, “is an acquaintance. We know each other and we work in the same place and we get on, but like some humans, I know as soon as I turn my back on him he’s quite likely to stab me in the back.”
What I did tell this group of volunteers, like every group before to that date, was that once we left the lion enclosures, as we did that morning, they would be able to go into an enclosure with a fully grown cheetah.
From the start, Rodney Fuhr had wanted to broaden the Lion Park into a predator park, which was how we ended up with the hyenas, the leopards, the jaguars, and some cheetahs.
Some people in Africa keep cheetahs as pets and, generally speaking, they are not aggressive towards human beings. Filmmakers, and even tourists in the Masai Mara in Kenya and Serengeti in Tanzania, have had cheetahs climb up onto the hoods and roofs of their vehicles in order to get a better view of the surrounding savannah while searching for food. We had an old cheetah called Ricksey who was fine around volunteers for a number of years, but after he retired we started using Lenny, a younger male, and Arusha, a female of similar age, as our star attractions for the volunteers’ visits.
I slid open the gate and the young volunteers filed in, a little apprehensively, behind me. I think I could smell their fear, though a couple of the guys tried to exude confidence. As the volunteers might be working with the cheetahs, we wanted everyone to get to know each other. Arusha was never a problem. She padded over to me on cue and started licking and nuzzling me. One of the volunteers reached out to pet her and she was as gentle as a kitten, a very big, noisily purring kitten.
“Cheetah are not ferocious man-eating cats,” I told the group as they stroked the pliant Arusha. “I don’t think there has ever been a recorded fatality of a cheetah killing a human in captivity or the wild—in fact, I would probably put money on it.” The volunteers nodded bravely.
“Lenny, come boy,” I called. Lenny got up from the shady spot where he had been sitting and walked towards us.
Lenny studied the group of young people, who had fanned out behind me so they could start taking pictures of our magnificent male cheetah.
“Stay close to me, but it’s okay to pet him,” I said. “Watch out for his teeth.”
Lenny started trotting, and I sensed a determination in his long-legged stride. A few of the braver volunteers stepped forward and started to run their hands down Lenny’s spotted flanks when he reached the group. “Good boy, Lenny,” I said, scratching and grooming him.
But Lenny, though he may have enjoyed the petting, had one thing and one thing only on his mind.
He darted away from those of us who were stroking him, and quick as a flash he was behind us. He lunged at the female volunteer he had singled out, wrapped his paws around her waist, and hooked onto her with his dew claw. Not many people know that a cheetah’s dew claws are retractable, but Lenny had his out and he meant business.
The girl shrieked as the sharp claws pierced her clothing and met soft skin. The other volunteers stepped back out of the way. A couple ran for the gate. With his prey in his grasp, Lenny bit down on the piece of the girl he wanted—her behind.
“Lenny, off!” I shouted, and smacked him on the nose. Lenny bit down on his mouthful of butt, but eventually I managed to prize his jaws from the tender, succulent flesh. The poor girl was screaming as I ushered her out of the enclosure.
“Give us some privacy, please,” I said to the others. The girl unzipped her jeans and lowered them. There on the pale white skin of her bottom were four neat red puncture marks. “I’ll have to clean them,” I said.
The girl groaned. “Will I need a tetanus shot?” she wailed.
“I’m afraid so,” I said to her. I pitied her, as I myself would have been a lot more worried about the needle than Lenny’s bite, but he had drawn blood.
That was the last time we let volunteers in with an adult cheetah. It was the third time Lenny had tried to bite a volunteer, though the first time he had successfully sunk his teeth into his target. With some groups Lenny was fine, but on each of the three occasions when he had caused trouble, there was a young lady in the group with what I can only describe as a derriere that pushed Lenny’s particular button. And it was only girls he was interested in. There had been amply padded men in the enclosure and Lenny had ignored them.
I was in a difficult position. I could hardly say to one member of a group of volunteers, “Sorry, you can’t go in with Lenny because Lenny likes booty.”
Even old Ricksey, who was a far better behaved cheetah than Lenny, could be unpredictable.
Ricksey was the first cheetah we bought for the Lion Park and Ian had scoured the zoos and parks of South Africa to find him. There were plenty of places breeding cheetahs, for tourism or release into the wild, but they were reluctant to sell their cats and when they did offer us one, they would invariably ask for a huge amount of money.
Eventually an Afrikaner farmer from the Free State returned Ian’s call, saying he would sell us a cheetah for a reasonable price.
“Is it tame?” Ian asked the farmer over the phone.
“Tame, man? This thing is hondmak,” he replied, meaning his cheetah was “dog tame.” He assured us that Ricksey was a brilliant cheetah, in top condition, who was also very good with people. Someone went to the Free State to fetch him. I was so excited about working with our first cheetah, but when I first saw Ricksey he looked like he had been dragged out of his death bed.
One ear was half moth-eaten; his eyes were glazed over; his breath stank; and his fur was in poor condition, like the fuzz that lions get when they’re old and nearly dead. With the benefit of some knowledge I’d now say that Ricksey was probably twelve years old, as he lived another couple of years, and even in captivity cheetah only reach about fifteen or so.
He was a nice boy, though. He was friendly, although he wasn’t exactly hondmak, because he used to have little attacks of aggression now and then. I would be scratching him under the chin and he’d be purring loudly, and then all of a sudden he would rear up in a frenzied ball of yellow and black fur like he’d been shocked with ten thousand volts and try to attack me. Eventually he would calm down, and he was very good with the volunteers, unlike his successor, Lenny.
I met my wife, Mandy, at a very rough bar. It was called Tempos and was the kind of place that would have strippers at lunchtime to cater to the working crowd. Mandy was a personal assistant at an insurance company at the time. Tempos is on the R512, not far from the Lion Park and near where I lived. On the weekends there was a slightly better, mixed crowd, and a mate of mine invited me to drinks there on a Sunday.
I had a black eye, as two weeks before I had been at Tempos on the Monday of a long weekend, and I had been in a fight. I had been chatting to girl and we were getting on quite well, but she had neglected to mention that she had a boyfriend. When her boyfriend showed up, I said; “Howzit,” and he head-butted me.
“I’m never going back to that place,” I said to my mate.
“No, come. It’ll be fun.”
So I walked into Tempos with my mate. As soon as he was inside he was scanning the bar for girls. “Check, over there,” he said, pointing to two attractive females.
I fingered my eye and told him I’d go to the bar and order the drinks. When I had paid for our drinks, I saw my friend had already struck up a conversation with the two girls, and was focusing on one in particular. Her friend was blonde—at the time—and very pretty. I smiled as I approached.
“This is the guy,” my mate said. “Kevin works at the Lion Park, with the lions. Serious. You must come to the park and see him in action. Kevin will put on his show for you and wrestle with the lions—won’t you, Kev?”
I groaned inwardly. It’s embarrassing when your mates use you as their pickup line. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, so I agreed to show the girls around the park and my mate got busy organizing dates and times and sourcing phone numbers.
A week later I was at the Lion Park with my mate, who was waiting expectantly to see “his” girl again. Instead, Mandy, the blonde-haired girl, showed up with a girl neither of us guys had seen before. My mate was devastated, as he had packed a picnic and planned to make some serious moves. Undeterred, I set off, giving everyone the grand tour of the Lion Park.
Tau and Napoleon, as usual, were as good as gold with me, and we moved on to Ricksey’s enclosure. “Ricksey’s tame. We can all go in with him, Come,” I said to the girls and my mate.
No sooner had I stepped into the enclosure than Ricksey charged me and started smacking me with his paws. “Calm down, my boy,” I said, as his running claws scratched my arms and legs. I was smiling and laughing, putting on a brave face as the expert lion keeper, but Ricksey was in the midst of one of his psycho attacks. “Good boy, Ricksy,” I said as he ripped my pants. “Don’t you want to come in, guys?” I called to the others, who had stopped near the gate of the enclosure.
“Um, no, I don’t think so,” Mandy said.
I emerged with a torn shirt and pants and several scratches, laughing off Ricksey’s little incident as nothing. Mandy clearly thought I was an idiot. I could hear her saying later that day to her friend, “They say this guy’s got a gift, but it’s more like a death wish.”
Despite Ricksey’s fits, he was a fantastic animal and we wanted more cheetah. We managed to buy Lenny and Arusha when they were still cubs, at about six months, but they were a step away from heaven’s gates when we got them. Our vet was not impressed with our purchase. She looked at us like kids who had gone to a pet shop and bought the runt because we felt sorry for it, or who had picked up a mangy stray on their way home from school. Arusha was slightly better off than her brother, but Lenny was riddled with problems.
Anyway, we didn’t really have a choice. We could have walked away from the deal, but we wanted cheetahs desperately, so we took what we could get. Lenny and Arusha needed twenty-four-seven care and I took them on.
Despite my “impressive” performance in front of her with Ricksey, Mandy had agreed to go out with me after our picnic at the Lion Park, and by the time Lenny and Arusha came along we had moved in together, in a town house in Lone Hill.
Mandy has been an inspiration to me, as well as a pillar of support during the tough times in my life. I’m able to bounce ideas off her and she is forthright and honest in coming back at me with her opinions. She believes firmly in what I do, how I do it, and why I do it. It’s fantastic for me to have a partner who doesn’t see herself as being in competition with the animals in my life. Mandy loves animals, though fortunately not in the same hands-on way that I relate to them. We’re different people, and while we have both worked together at the Lion Park and around animals, there has never been competition between us on the work front, which I think is important. Mandy works in public relations and marketing, so she is great with people, while I am less into socializing with humans. I prefer my animals.
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.”