Part of the Pride
The Lion Park pitched to provide the lions and one of the locations for a French film called Le Lion—The Lion. It was a big deal for the park, and we won the contract to do the film shoot, but the most important thing in my life at that time was an imminent birth.
There was a rumor going around the park at the time that Mandy was pregnant, and that I was going to be a first-time dad. The rumormongers got the first part wrong. Mandy was definitely not expecting, but my girl Maditau definitely was.
Maditau and Tabby, the two female cubs who were only a few weeks old when I first met Tau and Napoleon, had been living in the same enclosure for a while with my two favorite male lions. My boys had been living the life of a pair of bachelors for their formative years, and this was perfectly natural for lions, as it had been for me until I met Mandy. It had given Tau and Napoleon time to grow and learn some discipline, and basically how to be a lion. It also meant they wouldn’t go all stupid the first time they come into contact with a lioness in estrus. My boys had earned their stripes, and they were eventually put in with Maditau and Tabby, my two girls.
We learned from the French film company that they wanted to shoot in June, in the middle of the South African winter. This is standard for filming in southern Africa as our winter is long and dry. We would be assured—as far as one can make assurances about the weather—of clear blue skies and spectacular blood red sunrises and sunsets through the dust and smoke and smog that coats Johannesburg at that time of year.
Two weeks before shooting began, Maditau gave birth to three male cubs and I was over the moon. A few days later—to the surprise of me and everyone else—Maditau’s sister Tabby gave birth to two female cubs. We didn’t even know she was pregnant. If Tau and Napoleon were my brothers, then I was now uncle to three boys and two girls. I didn’t know which of the lions had fathered which of the cubs, but that didn’t matter, as we were all happy.
As first-time moms, however, Maditau and Tabby were poles apart. Maditau did a fantastic job raising her litter, taking the cubs to her teats straight away and licking their tiny bottoms to help them defecate. She was proud and protective, as a lioness should be. Tabby, however, left her two cubs for dead. She wanted nothing to do with them.
I’d read that lionesses in the wild would sometimes adopt a sister’s cubs if something happened to the other mother, and I have since had some success in staging adoptions in captivity. I gave it a try with Maditau, thinking she might not be able to tell the difference between three cubs and five. I carried the two little females into Maditau’s night enclosure, when she was a safe distance away, and left them there. I sat down outside to watch what happened.
Maditau sauntered inside, walked over to one of the new arrivals, and picked it up in her mouth by the scruff of the neck. I felt a moment of hope. She had identified the cub, but had not savaged it or ignored it. Maditau carried the tiny bundle to her water bowl and dropped it in with a splash.
While the helpless cub squealed and thrashed in the water, Maditau calmly walked over to the other little female, picked her up, walked back to the bowl, and dropped her in with her sister. I couldn’t believe it. The cubs were yelling their heads off, but Maditau just walked back to her three male young, sat down beside them, and went back to sleep.
I thought, “This is not on!” I got up and went into her enclosure. Everyone had always told me to stay away from a lioness with newborn cubs, but I couldn’t let those two little girls drown. Maditau opened her eyes as I entered, but she was as calm, cool, and collected with me as she had been while going about her business a few moments before, trying to drown her nieces. I fished the wet, panicked cubs out of the water bowl and hurried them back to the nursery.
The hapless youngsters were named Meg, after the actress Meg Ryan, and Ally, after Calista Flockhardt’s character Ally McBeal in the television show of the same name, which was a hit at the time. Some of the staff, however, couldn’t pronounce Ally too well, so she ended up being called Ami.
Meg and Ami, who had been sired by my brothers Tau and Napoleon, became like foster children to me. If I was uncle to Maditau’s boys then I was dad to Meg and Ami. I have been with them all of their lives. I was angry, though, at Maditau for not accepting them, and at Tabby for rejecting them. My girls had put me in a difficult position. With filming about to start I was going to be bottle-feeding two cubs at night after long, hectic days on the set. Also, with no cubs to suckle, Tabby would come back into estrus straight away so our leading lions, Tau and Napoleon, would be distracted while they were supposed to be working.
It was a busy time. The best times to film in Africa are the so-called golden hours, just after dawn and just before sunset, when the light is soft and mellow and the grassy veld and tawny coats of the lions really do look like they’re made of precious, molten metal. I had to be up at four in the morning to get the lions ready for the day’s filming, and in the middle of the day I would spend time with little Meg and Ami, and load the others onto vehicles and prepare them for the afternoon shoot.
I couldn’t stay mad at Maditau—I’d known her as long as I had Tau and Napoleon. She was a great mom and was really looking after her cubs.
She was in a separate enclosure with her cubs, in order to simulate the eight-week period that occurs in the wild when new mothers take their offspring away from the rest of the pride. The theory was that male lions might not recognize newborn cubs as their own and would kill them, or that tiny cubs were simply not strong enough to endure the rest of the pride’s rough play.
When I approached her, Maditau would come to the fence as she always did, and start talking to me. “Wuh-ooow, wuh-ooow.”
“Wuh-ooow,” I’d say back to her. “How’s my girl today?”
I would tickle her through the gate and it seemed as though nothing had changed between us. The next time I stopped by, Maditau was out in the open with her cubs in tow and they trotted over to the gate on their tiny little legs to see who their mother was talking to. Cubs are curious, and soon they were weaving in between Maditau’s legs to try and get closer to the fence and see what all the fuss was about.
I knelt to look at the cubs. Where the sliding security gate met the fence there was a small gap, and as I was chatting to them all one of the cubs pushed its way to the front of the litter and fell through the gap.
“Shit!” I thought Maditau would have a fit. I scooped up the little squealing cub in the cupped palms of my hands. Maditau lowered her big face to the wayward cub and looked up at me. She was totally relaxed and looked at me as if to say, “Thanks, Kev,” as I pushed the tiny bundle back through the gap to her.
Helga and I were doing the rounds a couple of days later and Maditau was still in her night pen with her cubs. “I’m going to go in with them,” I said.
“Kev, you’re crazy. It’s one thing to check the cubs through the fence, but are you sure you want to go inside with a lioness and young cubs?”
“I’m going in,” I said to Helga. “But I want you here, just in case something happens. I wouldn’t want to try this by myself.”
I opened the gate, closed it behind me, and went to the night pen. I opened the door, but instead of leaving I waited in the open area of the enclosure. Maditau came running out and gave me her greeting the same way she would have if I had been on the other side of the fence. The cubs came out of their house a few seconds later and started to explore. I sensed no enmity from Maditau at all. Helga was looking on anxiously from outside and I started to think that we humans were making a bigger deal out of this whole interaction than the lioness was.
The cubs came up to me and I started to pet one. Maditau could see what was going on, but she seemed fine with the interaction. It might have been different if I had walked over to the cubs and tried to pick one up in front of her. It’s kind of like when a human mother has a baby. It’s okay if she says, “Here, Kev, hold the baby”, but if you go “Come on, let me hold it,” or just grab the kid without permission, some moms can be a bit nervous.
I’d been accepted by the males of this pride, Tau and Napoleon, and Maditau was happy for me to be in the same enclosure as her and her young. When the cubs came over to me and Maditau showed no sign of aggression, I knew something big had happened. If I had been accepted in this way, how much closer could I get to this family? People have said to me that lions tolerate people, and that is the extent of their relationship with humans. It’s like the old saying, dogs have owners and cats have servants. I don’t believe that about lions. Some lions only tolerate me—just as some people only tolerate me—but that day I knew I’d been accepted by Maditau.
I knew that I was part of the pride.
Filming began a couple of weeks after the two lionesses had given birth and Maditau still seemed comfortable with me being around her own cubs. As a result, we were able to let the French film crew get some shots of her picking her cubs up, moving them around and feeding them.
As usual, the crew was behind bars in a cage within the enclosure, but Maditau was happy for me to work with her in the open. The filmmakers were ecstatic, as they had planned on filming hand-reared cubs separately and superimposing them on film of lionesses. Conventional wisdom had it that lionesses with cubs would be incredibly protective and very aggressive towards outsiders, and that we would not be able to get close enough to her to film her interacting with her cubs. Maditau was happy to move her cubs around when I wanted her to, and it was an honor and a privilege for me to work with her on that film.
We were already doing ground-breaking stuff with Maditau, so I took another chance and introduced Tau and Napoleon to their young offspring. Conventional wisdom, of course, had it that the males would kill the cubs because they were less than eight weeks old. With me standing by expectantly, we let Tau and Napoleon in to see Maditau and her three cubs.
Tau and Napoleon were on edge, Maditau was on edge, and I was on edge. I didn’t know how the lioness was going to react—if she was going to be more aggressive now because of the males. It was Tau who broke the ice. He walked up to the little cubs and gave them a good lick, as if to say that he really wanted to be part of their lives.
Napoleon, however, was acting really strange. He was like a cat on a hot tin roof, or Tigger in Winnie the Pooh—all wound up and bouncing around the enclosure. Occasionally he would stop and sniff the cubs, and they were just lapping up the attention, calling, “Wa-OW, wa-OW.” Of course, it wasn’t all fun for the cubs. When lion cubs are first released they’re nervous, on edge. Sometimes they even urinate and defecate out of sheer stress.
It was amazing, all the interaction that was going on, and none of it violent or aggressive. Maditau was greeting all the other lionesses for the first time since she’d gone off to give birth; Tau was greeting the cubs; and Napoleon was bouncing around with excitement, all at once. And I was there at the center of it. It felt like another moment or milestone of pure acceptance and I was privileged to be a part of that special day.
Tau and Napoleon and Maditau and the cubs were all fine, and no one killed or ate anyone. Perhaps my boys were just exceptional dads, or perhaps conventional wisdom needs to be challenged a little more often.
Pelokghale was a huge lioness.
She must have weighed in at around four hundred pounds, and was as big as some adult males I’ve seen. She could be monstrous and vicious, and I wondered what sort of a mom she would make—whether having cubs would make her even more foul-tempered.
When Pelo had her cubs she started coming up and talking to me when I passed her enclosure, but then she would trot back to her night pen, where her young were denned.
Eventually I thought I would go in with her. I’d always had a very close relationship with Maditau, but I could see no reason why Pelokghale should act weird with me if I entered her enclosure, as she had been just as communicative with me through the wire of the fence as Maditau had been after she gave birth.
I went into Pelo’s enclosure and called her. This enormous lioness came bounding up to me, then paused. She turned back towards her night area, where her cubs were, and then looked back at me. Next she closed the distance between us and started nudging me.
“Come, come. Check this out, Kev,” she seemed to be saying to me. She led me towards the den.
I took my cue, and walked steadily behind her towards the pen. Pelo walked inside. I’m not completely stupid, so I waited at the entrance to the night enclosure. I knew that if I crawled inside, I would be confined and have no means of a quick getaway.
I peered inside, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom. Pelokghale had walked to the other side of the den where her cubs were sitting in a nest of straw. She picked one tiny bundle up in her mouth, brought it across to my side of the pen, and set it gently down on the concrete floor for me to look at. I was close enough to touch it, but I didn’t. One after another she repeated the process, depositing each of her cubs, which were only a few days old, in front of me.
At the time we were filming the documentary Dangerous Companions, about my relationships with the various animals at the Lion Park. The next time I went to visit Pelo and her cubs I arranged for the cameraman to come along, and I took a small digital camcorder with me in case Pelo repeated her offering of the cubs to me.
While the camera was rolling, I went in and Pelo again led me to the night area. I kneeled down at the doorway and once again she picked up one of her cubs and plonked it down in front of me. She was standing there licking the cub and talking, and the next thing I knew she was pushing the cub into my hands.
I knelt there, hands outstretched, with this tiny cub in my palms, holding it while its mother licked and cleaned it.
What happened with Maditau and her first litter, and Pelokghale and her cubs, doesn’t happen with every lioness, or even with those two every time they give birth.
At the time when I was so fully accepted by Maditau and Pelokghale, I had no hidden agenda and no intentions about why I was going in with them and their cubs, other than to see if it was possible. I wasn’t trying to strengthen our relationship so I could film a lioness and her cubs, or get pictures of me holding a cub. I did it because I wanted to, and because the lionesses were happy for me to be there. In Pelo’s case, she trusted my innocence enough to deliver her offspring into my hands.
Relationships change, however, in both the human world and in the animal world. One day I might go in with Tau and Napoleon and one of them will say, “Don’t come any farther, Kev.” At that point, I’d have to say, “Thanks for a great ten years, guys.” I’m not going to push our friendship. That would be hard, but I would have to respect the fact that change happens, and perhaps look at myself a little closer.
One of the scariest moments I’ve ever had with a lion—including my encounter with Tsavo—happened while I was working on this book, and it involved Maditau. I had been in Johannesburg at the recording of the soundtrack for our forthcoming feature film, White Lion. It had been a busy couple of weeks working with the production team, putting the finishing touches on the movie, and I was conscious that I hadn’t spent time with the lions for quite a while. Tabby had given birth to three cubs a week earlier—again an unexpected though pleasant surprise—and I was eager to get back to the Kingdom of the White Lion and see how the youngsters were doing.
The Sunday afternoon we finished recording, I rushed home. “Do you want to come see the lions with me?” I asked Mandy.
“No, thanks. I’m going to put dinner on,” she said.
It’s hard to explain, but the feeling that I needed to spend some time with the lions had been nagging away at me. I got into my Land Cruiser Prado, and on the short but winding and scenic drive through the Kingdom I was still feeling uncomfortable, even though I was on my way to see the pride.
I went straight to Tau and Napoleon’s enclosure because I wanted to see Tabby’s cubs, but when I got out of the vehicle I saw the big males were in the far corner and Tabby was obviously distressed. “Wuh-aaah, wuh-aaaah,” she moaned, almost as if she were calling her cubs.
“What’s wrong, my girl?” I said to her. I thought it was strange that she would be calling for her cubs when they were most likely in the night pen, where the lionesses usually den their newly arrived cubs.
Suddenly I noticed a flurry of activity in the middle of the enclosure. I saw Maditau and her three latest cubs, which at fifteen weeks were much older than Tabby’s and already proving to be a handful. Two of Maditau’s older daughters—each about three-and-a-half years old—were also with her, and mom and all her children were huddled together, totally engrossed in something.
I went closer to Tabby, and it was plain she was definitely very distressed. I checked the night pen and saw, with a sense of growing dread, that only two of her three cubs were in there.
Maditau and the others had managed to drag one of Tabby’s cubs out of the pen into the wider enclosure, and as I strode closer to them I saw that the lions were all fixated on the missing cub. They were in the process of almost pulling the little one to pieces. It was then that I heard the cub’s terrible wailing, a tortured, raspy raaarrr, raaarrrr noise. The plucky little thing was fighting for its life.
I ran at Maditau. It wasn’t the first time I’ve acted before engaging my brain, but I couldn’t stand by and let them torture the cub to death. Maditau turned on me when I got to within five meters of her, and in the nine-and-a-half years I’ve known that lioness I have never seen such aggression in her eyes. She had the cub in her mouth. She could have killed it immediately if she had wanted to, but instead she was taunting her own offspring with it, letting them bite and bully it, but also challenging them by taking possession of the hapless baby.
I could see the cub was badly lacerated and would probably die soon if I didn’t get hold of it. It wailed away in pain and pure fear for its life. Maditau stooped low to the ground and curled her tail, her eyes as wild as a snake’s. She charged me.
It’s common knowledge that one shouldn’t run from a charging lion, and I have honed my senses over the years to try and ensure that I say calm in potentially dangerous situations. This time, however, I wasn’t sure that my base human instinct to flee wouldn’t overpower me. As it happened, my legs froze on me. If, for some reason, I’d decided I had to run, I couldn’t have.
Maditau stopped half a meter from me. She was huffing and puffing and staring at me, while I stayed there, rooted to the spot. She looked back at the fracas she had left behind her and to the injured cub she had dropped. Maditau wanted to regain possession of the cub so she turned and ran back to it. But she wasn’t finished with me.
Three more times she left the pack and the cub to charge me, over and over again. After the second charge I picked up a rock and threw it at her. It bounced off her harmlessly, but seemed to make her even angrier, so I realized that probably wasn’t the smartest move I’d ever made. With each successive mock attack she seemed to get more aggressive. I knew that if I took a step backwards from the spot where my feet remained planted, or if I ran, she would come for me again.
I thought if she charged a fifth time, this book might end up being called Part of the Pride—in Memoriam of Kevin Richardson.
Maditau returned to the others and the stricken cub and I sat down. We eyed each other off in a tense standoff for a few minutes, though it seemed like an hour at the time. She backed down, but when she left the other lions, she took the mangled, screaming cub in her jaws and ran off into the bush.
“Screw this,” I thought. I wasn’t going to let her get away with killing one of her nephews or nieces, and showing her own kids how to torture a cub in the process. I ran to the gate, opened it, and got into the Land Cruiser. I turned the key and rammed the truck into gear and drove it back into the lions’ enclosure.
“Maditau! Maditau!” I roared, my arm out of the driver’s side window and banging on the Cruiser’s door as I drove slowly over the rocky ground in search of the recalcitrant lioness.
I found her eventually at the top end of the enclosure, with the cub still in her jaws. When she saw me, she dropped the cub. I thought that when she saw me in the vehicle she would realize that it was “game over.” I was wrong. It was game on. She charged the Land Cruiser, and for a moment I thought she was going to come crashing through the driver’s side window, which was open.
The Prado has electric windows, and I was stabbing the button with all my might trying to get the damned motor to move faster. She wanted to kill me, but like before, she still wanted to continually regain possession of the injured cub. She raced back to the cub then decided to come and charge me again.
When she came at me, I saw my chance to outmaneuver her. I drove around her and straight at the cub. It was so tiny that I was able to drive over the top of it—the wheels on either side of it—so that for a moment the four-by-four was providing the little one with an umbrella of steel.
Unable to reach the cub, Maditau stormed off and started running around the enclosure. Frustrated at losing the cub, she took her anger out on one of her older daughters, sinking her teeth into the other lion’s backside with a sound that made me wince.
By now, Tau and Napoleon had caught on to the madness that was unfolding in their enclosure. The two males ran to Maditau and one of them—I can’t remember which—gave her a beating. Thankfully, during that commotion I was able to get out of the car and pick up the cub.
As I drove toward the gate, Maditau escaped her dressing-down from the males and followed me. She circled me for a while, not letting me out of the vehicle to open the gate, but mercifully she eventually moved off.
My heart was racing, but inside the Toyota with me was a torn and shredded cub at death’s door, with severe lacerations and puncture marks on its throat and side. Strange as it might sound, I knew from experience that taking such a young cub away from its mother to the vet was probably the worst thing I could do for it right then. It was a feisty little thing and having survived so much torture, I thought it might pull through if I gave it some emergency first aid and then returned it to the care of its mother, sooner rather than later.
I carry an extensive first aid kit in the car. I pulled out antiseptic cream and a special type of powder we use which slows bleeding. I ran my fingers over the squealing cub, parting its fur to check its wounds in more detail. Where the others had bitten into the cub, they had punctured two layers of its stomach muscles, so that only a thin membrane of skin was stopping its internal organs from falling out. If they had managed to disembowel it, the cub would have died. It needed stitching, but I still believed that it would be better for me to hand the cub straight back to Tabby and have her care for it and feed it overnight. I would take it to the vet the next day, once the commotion in the enclosure had finally subsided. I returned it to Tabby, and while she received it graciously, once the cub was safe Tabby turned on me and threatened to eat me. She must have thought I was the one who had taken it from her in the first place! I couldn’t win.
I got home to Mandy shaken, and I was a very worried man. Not only did I think that I had just wrecked my nine-and-a-half-year relationship with Maditau, I was also worried about how it would affect my bonds with Tau and Napoleon, as we had all been getting on so well together as a family. I started cutting myself up mentally. I should have let Maditau kill the cub, I thought. Why had I intervened? No way, I countered myself. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had stood there and watched Maditau kill Tabby’s cub.
Of course, nothing like this ever happens without complications: ABC News from the United States was coming to film me with the lions two days later, on Tuesday. The ABC anchor was fascinated with the way I had integrated myself into the pride and how the lionesses allowed me free access to their cubs. Great. Here was the problem: now one of those mother lions wanted to kill me! On Monday we had to record the audio dub for the actors’ voices for White Lion. We also had to take the cub to the vet. And there was that final thing on my mind: the looming prospect of my death being recorded by ABC Prime Time the next day.
Monday evening I went back to the enclosure and I was, quite frankly, shitting myself. I opened the gate and went in. Maditau didn’t charge me, but she wasn’t particularly charmed to see me. She glared at me and flared her lip. I went on, talking to the other lions and interacting with them like nothing had happened. Tau and Napoleon rubbed heads with me in the traditional form of lion greeting, and Maditau’s cubs came up to me to say hello, as well. While Maditau remained surly, she didn’t eat me, which was about the only good thing I had to report to Mandy.
I was still fretting when the television crew from ABC arrived on Tuesday. I considered calling off the shoot right up to the last minute, but when we got to the lions I saw Tau and Napoleon were away from Maditau. The little cub was back from the vet and was doing well; we were able to present him to Tabby with no aggression on her part, which the TV guys loved. However, the crew really wanted to see me interacting with the males, so I went in to Tau and Napoleon’s enclosure and they greeted me. Maditau kept her distance, which was just fine by me.
I went up to Tau and he was fine. Next, some of the cubs came to join us and soon we all moved to where Napoleon was. We all sat down in the grass and it was great. The TV crew had three cameras, and they were loving the vision they were getting of the whole pride together—or so it seemed. Maditau was still off by herself.
Right then, an amazing thing happened. Maditau decided she didn’t want to be on her own anymore, so she came straight over to me, singling me out from the rest of the pride, and gave me the most friendly head rub I can recall receiving from her in many years, right in front of the cameras. I was lying down at the time, very vulnerable, and after she finished rubbing me, she plonked herself down between Tau and me. So there we were, all of us lazing there in grass in the shade of a tree, one big pride once more.
Humans are so used to wronging other people that we try to project these failings of ours onto lions and other animals. When you wrong another human, the victim can end up holding a grudge against you and we think the same thing is true with animals. Maybe Maditau did want to kill me because I intervened over the cub, but she didn’t do it. Maybe she was just having a bad day. I was so worried that she was holding a grudge against me, yet she was able to lose the baggage and get back to normal quicker than I was. It’s what I really love about lions, this ability to forgive and forget so quickly.
Sometimes I go to bed at night and wonder if I am getting too cocky. Am I thinking that I can conquer the world? Do I think I can go to America and tame rattlesnakes for another documentary? It’s at times like this that I take a deep breath and try and appreciate what I already have and what I’ve achieved, and simply to be thankful for the day I’ve just spent.
Every once in a while—sometimes it’s every two weeks, and at others it’s every couple of months—I get an overwhelmingly emotional feeling and start talking like a bit of a blithering idiot.
We’ll be in bed and I’ll say to Mandy, “Do you know how lucky I am?”
“You’ve told me, Kev,” Mandy will say. She is also a great leveler.
“No, you don’t understand how amazing it is for me to be accepted by these lions. They’re incredible. You’re incredible. I can’t believe how lucky I am.”
“Yes, Kev.”
I’m conscious of the fact that it’s human nature to only fully appreciate what you’ve had when it’s gone. I make a point of realizing how privileged I am, because I like to appreciate what I have. I make an effort not to take what I have for granted and I try to humble myself. The fact is, it is easy for a human being to go beyond himself and think that everything he does is special.
What is special, in my case, is that my wife and my animals have let me into their lives.
When Meg and Ami come to greet me they run at me like they’re trying to take down a zebra.
They were boisterous as cubs when I was hand-raising them, and now, as lionesses weighing in at nearly four hundred pounds each, they can knock me to the ground when we play. It freaks Mandy out. She is far more concerned about me playing with the lionesses than with old Tau and Napoleon, who are past the age of jumping on my back and knocking me to the ground. Mandy is not jealous of Meg and Ami at all, but she is worried about how rough we all play together. To me, however, Meg and Ami are the most gentle lions I know, in terms of their characters, if not their strength. Fortunately, too, Mandy only comes to see the lions a couple of times a week, so she doesn’t get to see everything that goes on when I play with the lions on a day-to-day basis.
When I was raising them, and Tau and Napoleon, people would always tell me that at some point I would have to stop letting the lions jump all over me. The thinking was that when a lion reached a certain age, it would decide to kill me rather than just play with me. I thought this was nonsense. Sure, I learned the hard way to be wary around some lions in their teenage years—between two and three years—but the lions I hand-raised have never wanted to kill me. When Meg and Ami reached about two years old, they became too heavy for me to piggyback around their enclosure. They still wanted to jump on me, only now when they did so they would push me to the ground. Having reached that level of maturity did not mean they would kill me once they could knock me down.
The only danger I face with Meg and Ami is being squashed to death, and in fact that has almost happened to me. One day the girls and I were lazing about, and first one then the other decided to lie casually across my body. I couldn’t move, and every time I breathed out their combined weight compressed my chest a little more. I couldn’t draw a breath as Meg and Ami were crushing my lungs. I wasn’t strong enough to lift them. Plenty of people have predicted I would be killed by my lions, but not like this! I was panicking, laughing and crying from the ridiculousness of it all at once. Fortunately, they shifted just in time.
Occasionally when we are lying around, one of them will accidentally punch me in the face with a huge paw when she is trying to get up again. I do suffer cuts and bruises and scratches, but it’s all part of the play. These girls are special lions and special friends of mine, and I am as intimate with them as a human can be with a lion.
There is a difference, I think, in how I am perceived by the different lions in my family. Tau and Napoleon treat me as an adopted brother, but they know I am not a lion, so something in them makes them hold back a little when we play. I jumped on their backs once to see how they would handle it. They left me there for a while then shook me off.
Meg and Ami think I am another lion, and that’s the way they play with me—rough. From an early age I used to carry the two sisters on my back and people thought I was crazy, piggybacking lions. Now if I jump on their backs, they jump on mine—and flatten me. They hold nothing back with me, but just as when I had Meg clinging to my back when she swam with me, she knows not to claw me, because that wouldn’t be play.
If I pushed the boundaries of relating to lions with Tau and Napoleon, then I broke every single rule relating to what one can and cannot do with a lion with Meg and Ami. I imprinted myself on them from the day of their birth, when I saved them from drowning by Maditau.
I was at the vet’s one day and someone brought in a South American jaguar. It was a stunning animal. When I got back to the Lion Park I told the guys what I’d seen, and unwittingly set the wheels in motion for the animal to be purchased for the park.
Personally, I’d always thought we should stick to African animals, but other people thought it should be a predator park, so we soon found ourselves with a jaguar named Jade, after Rodney Fuhr’s stepdaughter. The jaguar was beautiful, with a richly colored coat, similar to that of a leopard’s but with larger, more vivid rosettes. Beautiful . . . and bad.
Jade was a terror—in fact, she was a witch. At seven months she was attacking people. Helga was the only one of us who had some success with Jade, who otherwise wanted to murder everyone and everything that got in her way. She had a thing about jackets and attacked many a staff member in order to get her claws on their clothes. Once she got hold of something, she claimed it. She was very possessive.
One morning I was doing the rounds and when I stopped by Jade’s enclosure, she wasn’t there. “Oh, no!”
I moved on to Meg and Ami, who were living next door with a mixed bunch of other brown and white lionesses. To my surprise I saw that Jade was in with them. She had scaled the high fence of her enclosure, paw over paw, and landed in with two exuberant lionesses who dwarfed her. Something had happened—Jade had finally met her match. The lionesses had obviously sorted her out during the night, but she was still in one piece, and sitting in there with them quite placidly.
Meg and Ami and Jade all still live together, and while the girls put Jade in her place, they are still wary of her. She’s still a witch, though the lionesses keep her in check.
I’ve been criticized for deliberately putting different species in together, but I’ve only ever done it when I thought it was in the animal’s best interest. Jade would have been a solitary animal in the wild, but she needed a mature female—or two—to sort her out and teach her some discipline. I’ve also put hyena cubs in with lions and they’ve gotten on fine. Lions and hyenas are sociable animals that live in a hierarchical society. They like company, and despite good old conventional wisdom, they are not natural born enemies. At the moment I have a hyena called Spannies who is living with some feisty six-month-old lion cubs. They’re all the same age, and while the lions already dwarf Spannies, there is no doubt that the little hyena thinks he rules his mixed clan. I’ll separate them eventually and put Spannies back with the hyenas—an extremely complicated process—but for now they’re all learning about relationships.
I might have become part of the pride of lions and an honorary member of Uno’s hyena clan, but at the Lion Park I was still an employee. I had formed relationships with the animals I worked with, but I had no real control over their destinies.
Mandy and I went on leave for a beach holiday at Knysna on the Garden Route, about 1,500 kilometers from Johannesburg. Some people think I never take leave, but I do. I’m a normal person in that respect, though Mandy will tell you that after three weeks away from my lions I’m like a bear with a sore head.
When I got back to work on a Monday morning I was walking around saying hi to all my animal companions. When I got to Meg and Ami’s enclosure, I called them but they weren’t there.
“Where’re the girls?” I asked Ian, the park manager.
“We sold them.”
“You what? Fuck! No way. How can you sell my lions?”
“Kev,” Ian explained patiently, “they’re not actually your lions.”
“You sold my soul mates.” It turned out Meg and Ami had been purchased by a guy who wanted some new females to ensure genetic diversity among the lions on his private game reserve. It was like having two of my children sold into slavery.
I had a lot of respect for Ian, but he was busy making business decisions while I was busy making relationships. I was still furious. I knew Ian was right, that it wasn’t my call to make, but I still couldn’t believe that anyone would have sold those two lionesses in particular without consultation. It wasn’t like we didn’t have lionesses to spare. We had plenty of other “wild” lions—those that hadn’t been tamed or grown up around humans—who would have been perfect for the game reserve’s needs. I didn’t imagine the owner had especially asked for two tame lionesses.
I went to Rodney Fuhr and asked if we could get Meg and Ami back.
“And just how are we going to do that?” Rodney asked.
Rodney was the park’s owner—and by now like a father to me—but I couldn’t abandon Meg and Ami. “I’ll call the reserve. We’ll give them two other lionesses.”
“All right, Kev,” Rodney said.
Ian, to his credit, called the reserve and they agreed to the exchange. The reserve’s own er drove to the park with two lionesses on the back of his truck.
“Here are your lions,” he said, opening one of the boxes. The first lioness jumped out and looked around her. She clearly had no idea where she was.
“That’s not one of my lions,” I said. I checked the other box, but neither Meg nor Ami had been brought back.
“Ag, all lions look the same. How do you know the difference?” the man asked.
“How do you recognize your dog?” I spat back at him. “How do you know your sons? That’s how I know these lions.”
The man scoffed, but we put the lions back in their boxes and I told the man I was going to his place to bring back Meg and Ami. He shrugged and got back into his vehicle.
We loaded two crates onto the back of the Toyota pickup and took Helga with me for the drive to the game reserve. It was about an hour and a half deeper into the rolling hills and farming country of North West Province, and I broke all the speed limits on the way. I was still seething. I’d learned that Meg and Ami had been put into a pride of fifteen lionesses and they had been with them for two weeks already. I was sure I would know them as soon as I saw them and was equally sure they would remember me.
When we got to the reserve, the own er and his wife offered us drinks and muffins, but I was impatient to see my girls again. In his own good time he led us to where he was keeping the lions, and I was sure he was quietly sniggering at me on the way. The lions were in a temporary enclosure, where the man was building up the pride prior to releasing them into the reserve. They had no shade; just bare earth with a man-made mound in the middle of their yard.
“So how are you going to recognize them from this distance?” the man asked me. “Or are you going to walk in there with all those lions?” He was clearly still very skeptical.
“I’ll call them.”
The own er just shook his head, as if I was a madman.
“Meg! Ami!”
Two lionesses lifted their heads and stood. They bounded over to the fence to me. The other cats ignored them, and the humans outside.
“Hello, my girlies!” They started talking back to me and rubbing themselves against the fence.
“Jeez, man,” the reserve’s own er said in his thick Afrikaans accent, “I can’t believe those things know you, and know their own names. So now how do you get them out of there and into the boxes? I had to drug the other two to move them.”
“Watch,” I said.
I had the two boxes brought over and when I opened the gate a little, just wide enough for a lioness to squeeze through, I called Meg. She walked over and straight into the box. Once she was secured and the other box was in place, Ami did the same thing. We put them on the truck and we all went home. The guy was dumbstruck.
That incident was one of the defining moments of my life. It was the point at which I realized that I didn’t have any control over these animals’ lives. They could be sold at any time. Would I have to play favorites next time the park had to sell a lion? I didn’t have the means at the time to buy up all the animals I had developed relationships with. I’d started at the Lion Park as a visitor, then moved on to become a part-time and eventually full-time employee. My job was initially to enrich the lives of the animals under my care, but what use was there in getting them to trust a human if they could be sold off?
The future of animals in my care remains a predicament for me to this day. I had to face the fact that I simply couldn’t keep every animal I was close to, especially once they bred and produced cubs. Even now, space and money are issues. It takes both to enclose predators properly.
What use, I wondered back then, was being part of a pride of lions, with equal ranking to the two senior males—my brothers—if I couldn’t protect them?
