Part of the Pride (14 page)

The way he looks, the way he acts, the way he behaves, the way he talks, the way his hair stands up or his tail flicks can all tell you something about what's going through a lion's mind. Behavior also needs to be taken into context. A lion locking eyes with you doesn't mean he's going to challenge you, although it can mean that he's challenging you for possession of something. During filming I've stared at Tau confrontationally to try and make him growl at me, and while it works sometimes, at other times he knows it's not for real and he calls my bluff.

To live and work with animals you have to get to know them, and understand that an individual's behavior will change from time to time, in the same way that people change from day to day. I've
known Maditau the lioness since she was a baby, and over the past nine years she's raised several litters in my presence. She knows me well and she's never been particularly possessive about her cubs, but her current litter is different. It could be because it's probably going to be her last litter, but whatever the reason she doesn't like anyone—not Tau or Napoleon (either of whom could be the father) or me—going near them. I think she thinks we're going to eat her babies.

While Maditau has made it clear to me that she doesn't want me approaching her cubs this time around, sometimes the cubs will come to me when I'm sitting in the enclosure with the rest of the pride. When I can, I spend two or three hours a day just lying around with my lions, snoozing in the midday heat or checking e-mails on my PDA. Cubs are curious and one time when they walked over to me, Maditau watched them like a hawk. She tolerated them approaching me and checking me out, and when they returned to her she looked at me and I looked back at her. She curled her lip and growled at me, so I looked away. When I looked back at her she growled again, so I knew that while she was putting up with me, she really didn't want me in the enclosure near her babies this time around. I have to respect her wishes, so I got on all fours and slowly crawled away from her, the way another lion would if she was giving him the same signal. I didn't stand up and back away, because that might have aggravated her even more—she might have construed standing as me challenging her. What she did and how I responded constituted normal behavior for lions, but other lion trainers and wranglers would probably have a heart attack if you told them to, one: be near a lioness's cubs in the same enclosure; two: turn your back on a lion; three: get down on all fours in front of one; and, four: crawl away in the opposite direction with your back to her.

My lions aren't used to me acting like a lion tamer or zookeeper would, they're used to me acting like a lion.

There are plenty of so-called experts on lions in South Africa and I've heard a few interesting theories on how it is that I can do
what I do with my lions. One of the most common theories is that my lions are so well fed that they would never consider eating me, or that they are declawed (Tsavo was the only declawed lion I've ever interacted with). Other theories are that I carry a concealed weapon or a shock stick, or that there is always another handler outside the enclosure armed with an AK-47 assault rifle who is there to step in when things go wrong. All of this is rubbish. Some people can't understand that I can have a relationship with lions and that's their prerogative. I'm not going to get upset if someone doesn't believe me. If people want to believe that I need a cattle prod or gun-toting guard to work with my lions, then good for them.

There are some milestones in life that you never forget.

When I was visiting Tau and Napoleon in the early days, I used to go into the enclosure walking fully upright, like a human being—naturally. The lions would nip and bite at my ankles and legs and try to leap up on me, hooking their claws into my pants and shirts. Eventually they would tire of greeting me in this way and they would go and sit down. Even though I had been told not to sit down or crouch around the lions, I wanted to spend time with them and I couldn't very well stand up for two or three hours. I could have gone to the far end of the enclosure and sat down and watched them from a distance, but that would have been the same as sitting outside the enclosure and I wanted to be closer. Eventually I decided to sit down about two meters away from Napoleon, as back then I thought I could trust him more than the clear-eyed Tau.

I remember sitting there one day, the warm sun on my back, just watching the pair of them and thinking to myself how lucky I was just to be there, sharing time with these two amazing, fast-growing cats. Napoleon got up. He was about fourteen months old by this stage so he was getting tall, with a grizzly fringe of hair under his chest that would later become his magnificent mane. He stretched
and yawned, showing off his lengthening canines, and then started walking towards me.

Normally, when he stood up I would stand up, but this time I remember thinking, I wonder what would happen if I just sit here? Napoleon came closer, entering my space, and he just flopped down beside me. He wanted to be near me.

What I've found out about lions since then is that they love to touch. Even in the middle of the day in the heat of summer, you'll see lions in the wild and captivity lying all over each other. They love it. These days, Tau, Napoleon, and I will often sleep in the grass together and they need to be touching me. If I roll over and break contact with one, I'll feel a massive paw reaching blindly for me, or the twitch of a tail as it snaps over and lands across my leg. It's so cute—I love it. If I have to get up, they'll both wake up, looking at me as if to say, “What's wrong Kev, why do we have to get up?”

I'm not into spiritual mumbo jumbo but I do believe that everyone, every person and every animal, has an aura—an energy around them. Sometimes we don't like having our space invaded and at other times we do. Personally, I don't like being crowded unless you're my wife, my lion, my hyena, or my dog.

When Napoleon flopped down beside me that first time, I knew he had come into my space so I thought it was okay for me to do the same. I leaned over and put my arm on him and he did nothing at all. It was a memorable moment. The next time I sat next to him, I was confident enough to touch his paw and hold it. After that it was me tickling him on the belly then him interacting with me when I lay rather than sat, or crawled through the grass. I would still give the lions time to release their energy at the start of our sessions together, and try the experimental stuff once they had calmed down.

Sometimes the experimentation was unpredictable or scary, mostly because of what other people had told me not to do and the preconceptions they had drummed into my head. The first time Tau
jumped on my back set my heart racing. I was crawling and he pounced and landed on top of me. He was a heavy boy. I waited to see what he would do, but he just lay there, hugging me. I was starting to realize that my inhibitions about these lions were simply in my mind. In the back of my mind was the guy saying, “Don't trust the lion with the clear eyes.” These days I listen to my own senses and instincts, not the words of people.

Touching and playing and rolling around on the ground led to hugging, but I found things were always easier when I was down on the lions' level. I wondered if the boisterous play at the start of each visit was not so much about them being excited and full of energy, but rather just them trying to pull me down to their level. The next time I entered their enclosure I did so on all fours, and then lay flat on the ground. When I was down in the grass on my belly, they didn't jump on me because there was no need to—I was already at their level.

I started taking meat into the enclosure with me to feed Tau and Napoleon. Not knowing any different, I fed them from my hand. That, I soon learned, was a definite no-no in the world of lion handling. Meat should always be given to a lion from the tip of a stick, as a lot of people believe that a lion can't tell the difference between the meat and your hand. As well as not crouching or crawling or lying around a lion, I wasn't supposed to approach it head-on, or put my hands near its mouth. I let my lions drink water out of my cupped hands and that, like most things I do, is also forbidden in the world of lion-keeping. I'd already broken all these rules before I even knew they existed.

Rubbing heads with each other is a form of greeting for lions, so that's what I started to do with my boys. Even though they are full-grown adults we still greet each other the same way. In the wild, lions also have to clean each other. After devouring a buffalo or wildebeest carcass in the bush, lions' faces are covered in blood and gore. Like
house cats, they rely on their siblings or parents to clean the parts of their face they can't reach. My lions love to lick me, and while it's an important part of the bonding process, it can also be quite painful.

A lion's tongue is covered in scores of spiky papillae. A house cat's tongue is the same, though in miniature. When feeding, this allows them to literally lick the skin from their prey, and to loosen the meat from the bones of the carcass. A few good licks from Tau and Napoleon on the same part of my arm will start to draw tiny beads of blood—it's like rubbing fifty-grade sandpaper against your skin. They lick me because they want to groom me, and as I can't return the same favor I carry a round plastic hairbrush with me with stiff but flexible plastic bristles. I comb them with it, particularly their faces and manes, not just to remove stray burrs and twigs, but to bond with them.

Later, my “unorthodox” methods started to come to the attention of people outside of the park, when we started filming commercials. When it was time for a break, I would have to take the lions back to their enclosure and call out, “Lions back in enclosure—safe!”

Instead, I would call out, “Lions and handler back in enclosure—safe!” Then I would lie down with my boys in the shade of a tree and have a sleep with them. One of my favorite positions with Napoleon is to lie down at right angles to him with my head on his belly and one of my arms on his forelegs and the other on his hind legs, as though he's a big hairy armchair. He loves it, too.

What was becoming clear to more and more people as time progressed at the Lion Park was that I actually did know what I was doing, even if my methods seemed a bit unusual. Workers on the film and commercial sets started taking happy snaps of me with the lions so people began seeing what I was doing without knowing the full story of how I was doing it. This is probably what started to give rise to the stories about full-bellied and declawed lions, cattle prods and guys in the background with AK-47s.

I'm not on a one-man crusade to change the way people work
with tame lions. While I believe, naturally, that my way of relating to predators is good for me and good for them, I cannot write a textbook for lion-keepers on how to form relationships with their animals. It doesn't work that way.

I learned about animals slowly, over a number of years, and I'm still learning. As I've said, I love motorcycle racing, so I'll use an analogy from that world. People have asked me how I learned or developed my methods. It's the same as asking me how I was able to break the one-minute, fifty-second barrier for a lap around Johannesburg's Kyalami racetrack on a motorcycle.

When I first got my bike, the best time I could do was two-minutes-twenty and I thought I was going to crash as I went into every single corner. Over several years I was able to reduce that time to one-minute-fifty. There are superbike schools that I could have gone to, but I already knew how to ride my bike. One-minute-fifty was a good time for a recreational racer like me, but I wanted to push the limit. I realized pretty early on that when I was trying very hard to better my time, it wasn't happening, and I probably stood more chance of having an accident than when I was riding for fun and not really concentrating on what I was doing. Reducing my time from two-twenty to one-fifty happened over time, not overnight. I shaved half a second off my time here, a tenth of a second there, and little by little those savings added up.

I learned to do what I do with big animals the same way that I bettered my racing times—in increments. I started when they were young and it took us years to get to the place where we are now. A lion—any animal—will often allow you the opportunity to explore something.

Swimming is an example. One day I was walking in one of the open areas of the Lion Park with the lionesses Meg and Ami. Meg's the athlete. Like Napoleon, she has oodles of confidence and will try
almost anything, although don't be fooled—she has an extremely sensitive side and can sulk for weeks. Then it's up to you to figure out why! She knows she's special and knows she holds a huge chunk of my heart, therefore gets away with murder because she tugs on my heart strings.

Ami is slighter than Meg and built in a more slender way. She'll follow what Meg does more often than not, but always seems less boisterous and not as confident in her own abilities. Ami's like that child who just needs a bit of reassurance every now and again.

It was summer, the grass was long and green, and we were passing a dam, filled to the brim and surrounded by thick reeds. I noticed that Meg was quite interested in the water and was padding around in the shallows, experimenting tentatively by splashing the water with her big paw. It was a warm day, and I thought, what the hell, I'll get in the water and see what happens. I took off my sandals and waded in, wearing my cargo shorts and T-shirt. It might have been sunny, but the water was chilly. I carried on regardless, wading out into the middle, and once there I lowered my body fully into the water and started doing an imitation of what I thought a lion would look like swimming—kind of an exaggerated dog paddle.

“Come, Meggie. Do you want to swim, my girl?
Wuh-ooow, wuh-ooow
,” I called to her as I swam.

Meg looked at me, puzzled, as if to say, “Kev, what you doing there, boy?”