Lights, Camera, Action . . . Sometimes
I learned the hard way where the theatrical expression “break a leg” comes from.
We had made a few television commercials at the Lion Park and were getting involved with documentary making when the French production company came to Africa in search of lions, locations, and wranglers to help them make their feature film, The Lion.
I helped put together the pitch on behalf of the Lion Park, and realized pretty soon that this was going to be very different from any filming work we had done in the past. For a commercial, we might need to work one or two lions for half a day, but filming The Lion was going to take about four weeks of shooting, using our animals every day. I had to put together a schedule and work out if we could supply enough lions and how we would share the workload among them. The most exciting part of the whole thing was that my boys, Tau and Napoleon, were going to be the stars of the show if we won the business.
The weekend before we were due to start shooting, I went to watch a friend of mine racing motorcycles at Kyalami. After the race my buddy showed me one of the new Big Boy 100cc motorized scooters that he had started bringing into South Africa. This wasn’t your garden variety commuter scooter, it was a big boy.
“Take it for a spin, Kev,” my mate said. “It goes like the clappers.”
I climbed on, pressed the starter, and revved it. When I took off I realized he wasn’t kidding. The scooter was a fantastic little machine and it had some serious power. As I was putting the scooter through its paces, a guy pulled his car out of a parking space in front of me without checking his rearview mirror. I hit the anchors and the scooter screeched to a halt, but as it stopped, the rear end swung round. I had put a leg out and the back of the bike smashed into my ankle. I cursed and groaned with pain.
“Shit, Kev, are you all right?” my friend asked as he ran up to the scene of the accident.
“Ja, I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, hobbling to one side of the street. “I’m sure it’s just sprained.”
I limped around for the rest of the day, and tried to kill the pain with a few beers when I got home, but as the evening wore on I realized that this was the worst sprained ankle I had ever suffered. Next morning it was swollen like a balloon and the pain wasn’t abating. I asked Mandy to take me to the doctor.
“Lion or hyena,” the admissions nurse asked, as usual, when she saw me limp in.
“Scooter.” I blushed a little, I think.
The doctor ordered an X-ray and later confirmed the bone was broken. “We’re going to have to put you in a plaster cast,” he said.
“No way. I’m filming for the next month.”
“Kev, you can’t put pressure on your ankle. You’ve got to rest up and take it easy.”
“Doc, you don’t understand. I have to put pressure on it and a cast is just no good. I’ll be walking through dirt and mud for the next four weeks working with my lions.”
The doctor shook his head at my stubbornness or stupidity—I don’t know which—and then decided to try me out with a new device, a plastic “moon boot.” He slipped the boot over my broken ankle and then inflated it with air. The pressure kept the bones in place and provided a cushion under the foot, which would hopefully allow me to walk.
I hobbled out of Sunninghill on crutches, but when I got home and tried to walk without them, it was too bloody sore. “Shit,” I thought to myself. How was I going to wrangle lions on film sets in the outdoors and in studios if I couldn’t walk? What an ass I was, getting myself into this situation. I saw my film career vanishing before it had even taken off the ground.
When I arrived at the Lion Park on crutches on Monday morning, I was greeted by a show of shaking heads and negative comments.
“There’s no way you can go in with the lions like that, Kev,” one of my colleagues said.
“You know the old story, man,” another said. “Lions always look for the injured and lame. Your buddies will think you’re prey—they’re going to eat you.”
“Bull,” I said to them all. I had spent half my life in the doctor’s surgery and the other half doing things people told me I shouldn’t or couldn’t do.
Angry at myself, and determined to prove everyone wrong, I set off slowly for Tau and Napoleon’s enclosure. When I opened the gate, resting awkwardly on my crutches, and closed it, the two big lions wandered towards me through the grass. Immediately, they sensed that something was different with me.
They paused and seemed wary, their inquisitive stares saying to me, “Kev, why are you holding those two sticks, dude? You never use sticks with us.”
They closed the gap between us and I greeted them. “Hello, my boys.” I put down the crutches and they relaxed. I took a deep breath, tried to ignore the pain, and started limping away from Tau and Napoleon on my moon boot. If the so-called experts were right then this would be the moment my relationship with my lions changed—for the rest of my short life.
They followed me. When I stopped, both of them, first Napoleon and then Tau, lowered their massive heads to inspect the moon boot. They started sniffing and curling their top lips up over their teeth in the way lions do when they are trying to scent new smells. I think they were intrigued by the hospital odor still on the moon boot, but what was encouraging was that they clearly didn’t see me as a different person, and certainly not as prey. Fortunately, too, they didn’t take a bite of my boot and let the air out of my filming career for good.
My lions had accepted me, but the problem was I still had to work for the next month on my moon boot.
“I don’t care about the money, we’ll cancel the shoot,” Rodney Fuhr said to me after I explained what had happened.
“You can’t just cancel a feature film, Rod,” I said to him.
The next hurdle was explaining to the French production company what had happened. When I told them, they couldn’t believe it, and I’m sure they thought I was a complete bloody idiot. I felt like I had screwed up a huge opportunity for Rodney and the Lion Park, so I told them I would be fine.
Working with lions is hard physical work at the best of times for someone in good shape, and this shoot was going to involve me doing a lot of running and jumping, leading the lions with a piece of meat to make them do what the crew wanted. I convinced Rodney and the French team that everything would be fine. On the first day I was cautious, using my crutches, and the lions performed like the stars they were. By the second day I had ditched the sticks and I was hopping around doing a kind of two-step to try and favor my injured ankle. By the end of each day of filming I was tired and sore, but my ankle held up and my lions didn’t eat me.
Even though they had to work hard, Tau and Napoleon did me proud and performed even better than I had dared dream. The days were long, starting before dawn and continuing till after dusk, and I was able to spend a lot of time with my lions, which was great. We would laze about and sleep together in the hot hours of the day, giving them time to digest the meat I had been feeding them as rewards for their performances. Tau and Napoleon must have eaten about seventeen dead horses between them during those four weeks, and by the end of shooting they were so full they were refusing to take the treats. However, they kept on working even without their rewards, and I felt they were doing what I wanted, not only just for me, but because they wanted to, which was fantastic.
Big Boy was quite an easy lion to work with, considering he was wild, but he had a temper and I had seen him go crazy in the past. He hadn’t had close human contact all his life, and he could be a ferocious beast when he wanted to be.
The French film crew wanted a scene of a lion being aggressive towards an African warrior and I thought Big Boy would fit the bill. We weren’t going to have an actor in the shot, for obvious safety reasons, so the plan was to film Big Boy against a blue screen and then add in the footage of the warrior actor later. The screen was set up in one of the spare enclosures at the Lion Park.
I parked a cage next to Big Boy’s night pen in Camp Three, where he was living at the time, and he moved into it without any problems. Next, we loaded him onto the vehicle for his trip to the set for a dress rehearsal, and so far everything was going well. Big Boy was growling nicely and when I opened the door and coaxed him into the filming enclosure, he went ballistic. The cameras weren’t rolling, but the director and crew were there, safely on the other side of the bars as Big Boy roared and growled and swiped at the slightest sign of movement. This was our ferocious lion at his best.
“Is that what you were looking for?” I asked the director.
“C’est magnifique! This lion, he is the champion. This is beautiful—exactly what we want. Tomorrow, we come with the cameras and we film this scene.”
Big Boy slept outside the set in a big cage adjacent to the filming enclosure, and the next morning we brought in the crew. Having seen Big Boy in action, everyone was paranoid about safety. No one not directly involved in filming was allowed within fifty meters of Big Boy, who had already gained a reputation as the meanest beast around.
“Okay, we are ready,” said the director. “Release the lion.”
I opened the cage door and Big Boy came striding out into the filming enclosure. He turned and fixed the camera crew with his golden eyes, no doubt sending a chill of pure terror down their spines.
He paced to the corner of the set . . . and lay down. I tried everything ethically possible to get Big Boy to be the big ferocious lion he had been the day before, but he wouldn’t budge. He yawned and did what lions do most of the time, slept.
In the end, we used Tau for the part of the ferocious lion, not because he was a particularly mean lion, but he did have a dislike for one particular person who worked at the park. I don’t know what it was between them, but this guy couldn’t go near Tau’s enclosure without the lion showing his extreme displeasure. I made sure the man in question was on the blue-screen set the next day and Tau acted like he wanted to kill him, which the director loved.
A guy by the name of Mike Rosenberg, who had run Partridge Films, a UK company specializing in documentaries, came to the Lion Park one day. He was a friend of Rodney Fuhr’s and I was asked to show him around. Mike saw me doing my thing with the animals. He was amazed.
“I’ve seen lion tamers in circuses, and animal wranglers interacting with animals, but nothing like what I’ve seen you doing,” he said to me.
“These are just my friends. I go in with them to enrich their lives and we all get something out of it.”
“But it’s not just lions. I’ve seen you go from a lion to a spotted hyena, to a jaguar and a leopard and then a brown hyena, and you’re doing the same thing with all of them. How do you do it?”
“It’s easy. I have a relationship with each of them.”
He started asking people around the Lion Park: “Have any documentaries been made about this guy Kevin?” Of course, one’s colleagues are always supportive and said, “No, why would anyone want to make a film about Kevin?” Thanks, guys.
The documentary he wanted to make about me would later be called Dangerous Companions, and we worked on that film for two years, which was a long time. These days, documentaries are shot in six months. Some of the filming was quite amateurish, and on occasions I even used a digital camcorder because that was all that I could use. For example, when I filmed Pelo’s cubs in their night enclosure, it wasn’t possible to take a full-sized camera and cameraman with me—the lioness would have killed the cameraman. In the end, I think the different formats and approaches are what made Dangerous Companions special. It wasn’t the quality of the video that was important, it was the scenes people were seeing—for the first time.
Some documentaries have a shot list and a director who says, once the lighting is exactly right, “Kevin, get the lion to walk from left to right, will you? Cut!” Our documentary was more like a home movie with me walking around with my camcorder saying, “Oh, look, here we have some little cubs. Here’s mom and . . . oops, here comes dad”—the 550-pound lion—“to check us out.”
People were seeing unique stuff, such as Meg running into the water and swimming for the first time. We had been filming some scenes for Dangerous Companions on the day I was walking with her, and while I didn’t encourage her to go swimming for the documentary, it made for a great visual because it was seen to be unique.
I always wonder if filmmakers really know what the public wants. They think that to be successful a documentary has to be perfectly lit, well stage-managed, and expertly filmed. While all of that is important, I think that people want to be entertained, to see new content, and to feel like they’re part of the story. All the fan mail I received from Dangerous Companions was about the relationships I had with the various animals, not the type of digital videotape we were using. While I appreciate how wonderful the film looks, the mail I was getting suggested that people were amazed at the bonds between me and my friends at the Lion Park. I wonder if someday both the look and the content of a documentary can be melded so that one can present astonishing footage that’s also beautifully photographed.
Around about the time we were making Dangerous Companions, I was approached by a producer from Natural History New Zealand, an organization which had been funding a series of documentaries about the formative years of various animals, all entitled Growing Up.
They wanted to make a Growing Up Hyena documentary and had found out about the Lion Park and the work we were doing raising hyena cubs and forming our hyena clans. I was excited about getting involved, as I’ve always felt that hyenas have never received the recognition they deserve as fascinating, intelligent animals. Hollywood, documentary-makers, and even Disney have tended to portray hyenas as sinister scavengers, feeding off the efforts of other animals and stealing from them. In reality, hyenas are efficient hunters who live in highly organized and structured clans, as I’d learned firsthand.
I’ve also found that some people think they will hate being around hyenas or getting close to one, but when they are introduced to them in the right way they fall in love with them immediately. I’ve seen volunteers come to the park who are itching to start working with lions, yet after their first introduction to the hyenas they come away wishing they could spend more time with them instead. It’s the same when you are forced to confront any prejudice, preconception, or phobia you may have head-on. Mandy, for example, always considered herself a cat person until she moved in with me and we acquired two dogs, Valentino and Dakota, and now she loves them to bits, especially the Staffie, Valentino.
In contrast to the way we were filming Dangerous Companions, the director and crew of Growing Up Hyena arrived with a plan and a shot list. They wanted to capture the life of a hyena cub at various key points of its life and I had the perfect animal for their story. Homer was one of two cubs that Uno, our supremely dominant wild hyena, had just given birth to. Homer had a sister, Marge, and in the way that Mother Nature ordains, Marge started picking on Homer as soon as the pair of them was born. In her bid to assert her dominance as the firstborn female cub of the leader of the clan, Marge was determined to ensure that Homer lived as short a life as possible. She would bite and scratch him and do her best to ensure that her brother did not get his fair share of Uno’s milk.
I knew that if I didn’t rescue little Homer—his sister was already outgrowing him—he would die. I thought that I could hand-raise him and then, when he was big and strong enough, introduce him back into his clan where hopefully he would be accepted.
There was something about Homer that touched me in a way that few other animals have. I have special relationships with Tau, Napoleon, Meg, Ami, and many others, and I knew from the moment I first picked him up that Homer and I would be great mates. When the director, who flew from New Zealand, and the local film crew arrived and started work on Growing Up Hyena, they too soon sensed that Homer would be a star.
Homer was a loveable but odd little guy, and for a while I thought he would go down in history as the world’s first vegetarian hyena. He was bottle-fed, but when it came time to wean him onto meat he wasn’t interested. Try as I might I couldn’t get Homer interested in flesh. I would place succulent cuts and bowls of different meats in front of him, but Homer would turn up his nose. He kept feeding from the bottle, but like the overindulged spoiled child he was, he didn’t want to give up the milk. My mom told me that I had the same problem as a kid and stayed on the bottle far longer than most kids did at the time.
In desperation I decided to make a game out of feeding. Homer liked to chase things, so one day I bundled my mountain bike and Homer into my vehicle—like Trelli, he loved riding in cars—and drove out to the airstrip at the park. Also in the back of my truck was a leg from a dead cow which had been donated to the park. I took a length of rope and tied the leg to the back of my bike and got on.
“Come, Homer!” I called, as I got on the bike and started peddling. It was hard work, but Homer immediately wanted to play. As I pedaled furiously, the leg of meat raising a mini dust cloud in my wake, Homer the hyena bounded happily after the foreign object. Up and down we went, with me getting increasingly exhausted, but Homer becoming more and more interested in the dust-encrusted lump I was dragging through the dust and grass. At some point a switch tripped in Homer’s little brain, and when he pounced on the cow’s leg that time he sunk his teeth into it and started eating. He was happy, I was happy, and finally I was able to stop pedaling.
As Homer started to feed and put on weight, I began the experimental process of introducing him to his old clan. His sister Marge was already much bigger than Homer, loving her position as the matriarch’s daughter. When I first drove him into their enclosure, she eyed Homer warily. Little did I know that this was a sign of things to come.
“Kevin, come quick, Homer’s desperately ill.” Rodney Nombekana had called me on my cell phone while I was driving and my first thought was that he was overreacting.
I thought, no way. Hyenas are tough, they never get sick.
“No,” Rodney insisted when I told him my thoughts. “He’s at the vet. You have to come, this is serious.”
I tuned the wheel to change course and planted my foot on the accelerator. When I got to the surgery, Homer was catatonic, passed out with his eyeballs rolled back in his skull.
“I think he’s been poisoned by something,” the vet said when I arrived.
While the vet monitored Homer’s deteriorating condition I paced up and down, wracking my brain to work out what could have happened to him. The Growing Up Hyena film crew was already at the vet’s surgery, and they filmed my arrival and my concern. I couldn’t blame them for being intrusive. It was their job to film the whole story, but when Homer died, I cried.
The autopsy showed that the vet’s initial suspicions were correct. Homer had died from poisoning by an unknown heavy metal, though there was no indication of how it had been administered. There was nothing in his enclosure he could have eaten or licked, and to this day I still don’t know what happened to him. I wondered if someone could have poisoned him, but why would anyone do it? He was such a cute little ambassador for the world of hyenas that I couldn’t figure why anyone would want him to die. I remembered, though, the look on Marge’s face when I brought him back to the clan and it sent a little shiver down my spine.
Homer’s death hit me hard and got me thinking about how I would react when all my other beloveds passed away. I’m not a fool—I know animals come and go, but this was a tragedy and it made me realize that forming so many relationships with my animals, rather than just “working” them, meant I had invested a piece of my heart in each of them. Homer was really the child whose life was ripped away before he got to make his true mark. His short time on earth, however, had more impact on the way people think of hyenas than any other documentary ever made. He was just one in a million. You don’t get dogs like Homer, never mind hyenas. I always felt, and still do, like a proud father when I speak of him, and I inevitably get all teary and emotional. Losing him and thinking about the others I might lose was as wrenching as losing a close friend or family member. These aren’t simply pets. They’ve become part of my family and I’ve become part of theirs.
What made it worse with Homer was that he was only three months old. To all intents and purposes I had been his father, hand-raising him and even teaching him to eat. I had lived, slept, and breathed with him for virtually all of his short life. It made me think about the pain people must feel when they lose a child. If Tau and Napoleon had to die tomorrow, I would be very, very sad, but I’d know that they’ve led great lives—better than any lion in the wild. Homer, however, had been poisoned at the start of what I thought might be a great life. He would have had me as a friend and I would have had him. But it was not to be.
The documentary makers, of course, loved it, from a professional perspective. They and their viewers were seeing real, raw emotion when Homer died in the vet’s surgery. At the time, however, the producers were very compassionate and said to me, “Let’s leave it,” and it looked like that would be the end of Growing Up Hyena. Later, they phoned me and asked if I would consider carrying on the story, perhaps with two other hyena cubs we had just acquired, Bongo and Tika. They hadn’t been part of the program, but they became the main game when I agreed to carry on with the filming.
It was an emotional time for me, getting over Homer’s death, and while I probably wouldn’t have been involved in raising Bongo and Tika, the filming forced me into their pen, along with Helga, who had been working with them. I needed to get over Homer, and while I may have been reluctant at first, Bongo and Tika worked their way into my heart, as well. We were able to complete filming the documentary showing the pair’s development, and in the process I made two new friends. Several years on, Bongo and Tika are still with me and we are great mates, but I’ll never forget Homer. I’m not a crier generally, but I cried all over again when I saw Growing Up Hyena on television for the first time.
