Part of the Pride (11 page)

I put Trelli in with the clan, but the other hyenas hammered him. Around people he was dominant, but with his own kind he was
the lowest of the low. Ironically, Geena, who became the dominant female after winning against Bonnie, mated with Trelli, behind the backs of all the other superior males! When the other males caught him and Geena going at it, they gave him an even worse time. I used to take Trelli out and give him pep talks, telling him to go back in and assert himself over the others, but of course that didn't work. In time we formed another clan, made out of rejects, who couldn't cut it with Geena and her family, but even they picked on poor Trelli and I was worried they were going to kill him. In the end I had to take Trelli out and put him back in an enclosure by himself, even though he had done his duty with Geena.

When Geena gave birth to her second litter of cubs she became very protective. When I tried to approach her and the cubs she started giving me low growling calls, which told me not to come any closer, and I respected that. Interestingly, when Bonnie later gave birth to a single cub, it was a different situation. I arrived at the enclosure one morning and the clan was all very excited. All of them, except for Bonnie, rushed up to the fence to greet me, and when I walked in it was like they were all smiling. They had their tails up, which meant they were excited, and it seemed as though they were busting to tell me something. I walked in and found Bonnie in one of the concrete pipes the hyenas used as shelters. Nestled between her front paws was a cute little chocolate brown cub. She was quite relaxed and I was able to walk right up to them, slowly, and check it out. It was a first for me, and a touching moment.

As the clan became established, the hyenas started changing the way they interacted with people, as well as each other. When the animals were in separate enclosures, there were about five of us humans at the park who could go in with them and interact with them to varying degrees. The hyenas knew us by sight, smell, touch, the sound of our voices, and how we tasted—especially how we tasted. Slowly, the clan started asserting their dominance over us.

The hyenas were all getting older and stronger by this time, and
one by one they started rejecting the people who had worked with them. Keepers who had patted and tickled the hyenas when they were younger started coming in for rough treatment, and one by one they began refusing to go in with the clan. The people who liked to carry sticks around the animals fared no better than the touchy-feely people. Hyenas eat bones, so a stick is nothing to them, and if you hit them with something to teach them a lesson it just makes them crazier. You can't enforce or reinforce a relationship with a stick. They'd raise their tails and start giggling, getting themselves into an attacking frenzy, and another keeper would call it a day. With the clan already developed and functioning as a unit, if the dominant female decided she wanted to attack a human then the rest of her family would back her up.

With my lions I try to be part of the pride, although even then there are differing degrees to which I am accepted by individual members of the pride. I am like a brother—sometimes even a father—to some, a friend to others, and an acquaintance to the rest. Not all of my acquaintances like me, but they know me, and we respect each other. I've never gone into a lion enclosure thinking I must dominate them, but the situation was different with the hyenas. I needed to assert and maintain my dominance over the clan, but I couldn't do that with a stick or a shock stick or a can of pepper spray, as that would just infuriate them. I had to be a hyena.

I was tough with them and I used to rough them up, in the same way one hyena would assert dominance over another. I would tackle them to the ground and roll them around; I would lift them up off the ground under their arms and swing them around, and I would bite them on the ears. I had to do this with all the hyenas, to assert my position in the clan, because they all wanted to challenge me. I also had to be down at their level, and it was a battle of wills as much as teeth.

If something happens to me there is one guy who could continue to do the work I do with lions and hyenas, in the same way that I do. His name is Rodney Nombekana and he is a fantastic guy.

Rodney was in his early twenties when he came to the Lion Park several years ago, from his home in Port St. Johns, in the Transkei region of the Eastern Cape. We call that part of South Africa the wild coast, because of its stark, spectacular beauty.

Rodney was one of several young black African gentlemen who were being sponsored by a private body, the Endangered Wildlife Trust, to study for a Field Guides Association of South Africa (FGASA) qualification. I imagine he pictured himself becoming a game ranger or guide for a private game reserve, or working for the national parks board when he qualified, but as part of his training he and some others visited us at the Lion Park.

Rodney stood out from the rest of the group from the first day. He was enthusiastic and excited and, like me, he would always ask questions. He didn't take things at face value—he always wanted to know why I did what I did, and how I did it. He reminded me a bit of myself. He was a hard worker and a good listener, with an analytical mind. Unlike some young people, he didn't expect to get to the top position in five minutes. He knew he would have to work hard, but that didn't mean he had to do things the same way as they had always been done, simply because that was the norm. The feedback from tourist visitors to the park was excellent and many people took the time to tell us what a knowledgeable and polite guy he was. In time, the other trainees fell by the wayside, but Rodney attained his FGASA level one qualification and was offered a full-time job at the Lion Park. Although I have since left the Johannesburg Lion Park, Rodney followed me and still works with me to this day.

Rodney had a soft spot for hyenas and took the time to research the various African cultural beliefs, insights, and misunderstandings about these fascinating animals. We were in with the clan one
day and I noticed that Agip, one of the males, was trying to dominate Rodney, who was backing away from the menacing animal.

“Hold your ground, Rodney,” I said. “If you turn away from him now you'll be finished with the rest of the clan.”

“I'm not sure, Kev,” he said to me. “He's going to bite me!” Agip had lowered his body and raised his tail. A hyena's back and head are tough as nails, but their underbelly is their weakest point, so when they crouch you know they mean business. He was closing on Rodney.

“Push him, Rodney. Get your hands on him and push him back.” Rodney grabbed Agip and dug his feet into the dirt. Agip kept coming at him, snarling, and he started to whoop and giggle, a sure sign that he was upping the ante with Rodney and trying to intimidate him.

Although I do it often, it was exciting to see Rodney standing his ground against this powerful animal. Agip backed down and Rodney kept his place in the clan. It was great to watch and just reinforced my own respect for Rodney.

To this day the hyenas are excellent around Rodney. However, if I'm there at the same time, there are a couple of individuals who will try and gang up on Rodney in front of me. It's an interesting dynamic; we all have our place in the clan.

We bought another hyena, Peggy, who was on her last legs. She was a real hand-me-down, in poor shape and with bad teeth. Amazingly, she gave us our first cubs, before Geena's, but we had to hand-raise them because Peggy rejected them.

Spotted hyena cubs aren't born with spots; they are a chocolate brown color. They are extremely cute and extremely vicious and they come into the world kicking and screaming and fighting. Hyenas are born fully mobile, with their eyes open, and with a full set of deciduous canine teeth, which they know how to use. They run around like little rats trying to bite each other and anything else that crosses their path. When a hyena baby clings on to your finger, believe me,
it feels like your digit has been put in a vise grip lined with needles. They scream like little pigs, so loudly that people think you're trying to murder them, when in reality the opposite is true. For some reason, hyenas also seem to pick the worst possible days to have their cubs, such as sub-zero days in the middle of winter, or during torrential rainfall in summer. Their babies come into the world either freezing their asses off or nearly drowning in mud and water.

So, raising our first cubs was difficult. They didn't take easily to the feeding bottle like lion cubs; they would try to bite through the rubber teat. Sometimes they would not feed for four or five days, which initially worried me. I started researching baby hyenas, reading anything I could get my hands on in books and on the Internet, and I found out that this was normal, as in the wild, hyena mothers often have to leave their cubs in the den for long periods while they go out hunting and foraging. The reason the cubs can last so long without losing condition, I learned, was that their mother's milk is very high in fat—much more, in fact, than the puppy milk formula that we usually fed to lion cubs. As a result, their diet consisted of a mixture of egg, cream, full-strength milk, and anything else we could think of that was high in fat and protein.

By this stage I was living with my then girlfriend Mandy and we had some hectic nights looking after Peggy's cubs, who were like two little devils. Mandy has had to endure all sorts of predator cubs around the house but the hyenas were without doubt the most destructive. I learned the two best places to keep baby animals were the kitchen or bathroom because of the amount of cleaning involved, and because those rooms generally had fewer things that could be chewed. Even so, the hyena cubs savaged my toilet brush and loved jumping up and pulling all the toilet paper off the roll.

In the wild, cubs fight with each other for dominance. A brother and sister will fight until the female asserts her dominance and same-sex cubs will sometimes fight to the death. We had a boy and girl, and Mandy and I would have to separate them sometimes for
their own good. I've had other cubs who have been so seriously injured by their siblings that we have had to take them to the vet. In the wild, if one is killed outright, or dies of an infected wound, the mother will take it out of the den for the other clan members to eat, or consume it herself.

Some people might think it's fun to raise a predator cub, and while it has its moments there are many unpleasant chores that have to be done. Lionesses stimulate bowel movements in their cubs by licking their bottoms. I don't do that, but I do have to rub them vigorously to make them defecate. The same went for the hyena cubs. When I noticed the hyena cubs weren't urinating, I had to stimulate their organs. It worked and they started peeing in every direction—all over me.

Uno was a wild hyena, a stock raider, which meant she had been killing cattle. She was captured by the government nature conservation people. They called the Lion Park and offered her to us, rather than releasing her into the wild, as they knew she would return to the farms and wreak havoc all over again.

So, this wild animal was dumped on our doorstep and we didn't know what to do with it. We didn't even know what sex it was. We put her—as it turned out—in the hyena enclosure's night pen, a solid room at the end of the compound, so she could recover from being captured. When she came around—I will never forget this—she was crapping all over her legs and cowering and running like crazy right at the brick walls. She had rubbed her head raw against the pen's walls, to the extent that you could see the white of her skull. She was in a complete frenzy, and I actually thought at one point that it might have been kinder to put her down. She had never known life in captivity and it was clearly freaking her out.

After thinking about it, we decided that if we were going to keep her we should try introducing her to the clan, so she could be part of
a new social system. I'd seen the ear biting and fighting that went on when we introduced hand-reared hyenas to each other, so I was more than a little concerned about how this wild creature would associate with the others.

My first thought, when the nature conservation people arrived with her, was that we would introduce the newcomer to the others in the clan in the same way that we had brought the rest of them together, putting her in an enclosure within or next to the clan's so they could start off by getting to know each other through the fence. We never got that far. Uno was under so much stress that if we left her in her night enclosure for too much longer she would kill herself, so we just opened the gate and let her out with the rest of the hyenas.

Uno shot out of the pen like a bat out of hell. She couldn't wait to escape and when she emerged into the sunlight, she was confronted by a bunch of other hyenas. She annihilated them! Our captive animals were completed frazzled by the onslaught they received from Uno and they just fell into line immediately. It was right then that we decided to name her because she was, without a doubt, and in a matter of minutes, Numero Uno.