Part of the Pride (16 page)

In South Africa “the wild” doesn't exist anymore. We have some fantastic national parks—the best in the world, I would say—yet they are finite areas that are either fenced or surrounded by physical features or human development that prevents the animals that live there from straying into the wider world.

The Kruger National Park, South Africa's flagship reserve, is huge. It covers an area the size of Israel, and even though it has recently been extended across the border into Mozambique, forming
what is now known as the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park, it is still an enclosure—albeit a big one. As soon as you enclose animals, and deny them traditional migration routes and the ability to roam endlessly, you have to start managing them. If you have too many animals in a lush part of the park with year-round water and good rainfall then you may have to lure some of those animals to drier parts of the park by building pumped waterholes. All of a sudden you start changing the natural makeup of an ecosystem.

As I have already mentioned, Kruger has a problem with elephants. As a finite area, the park can only sustain so many of these huge creatures, which consume huge amounts of food and water each day. Relocation of elephants to other reserves was tried, but proved not to be extremely successful. About six hundred elephants were transported across the border into the new Mozambican extension of the park, but most of them simply walked back to South Africa. Darting female elephants with contraceptives has proved to be a difficult management option. While numbers of elephants on the Mozambican side of the border have subsequently increased, culling, which was out of vogue because of local and international objections, is now back on the agenda as a part of the elephant management strategy.

Some people are against the domestication or training of animals. If everyone had always followed that line of thought, we wouldn't have domestic cats or dogs today, or be farming sheep or cattle, or chickens, or goats, or riding horses. Some people say I shouldn't be domesticating my lions, but I say that is rubbish. I enrich their lives and they do the same for me. In fact, every lion I've ever worked with has been domesticated in that it was conceived in captivity and born into captivity. I don't support the capturing of wild lions and placing them in captivity, nor do I believe all the captive lions should be prevented from breeding and allowed to die out.

What angers me about the debate over animals in captivity is that it's been hijacked by a small number of people at the extreme
ends of the spectrum. The die-hard greenies want to end any form of captivity, and at the other end of the spectrum unethical hunters and keepers who are cruel to their animals have given anyone who keeps an animal captive a bad name. You can't set all the captive animals free or eradicate everything in captivity—that's a crock of shit. As I've said already, my contention is that there is no “wild” area in South Africa anyway, as even in the national parks animals have to be managed to suit the physical constraints.

Does a captive lion long to be roaming free in the wilds of the Serengeti or the Kruger National Park? This is a human perception, and in my opinion the answer is no. A lion knows what it knows. If you take a lion out of a hundred-acre enclosure and put him in a small cage, he may adapt to his new environment, but it will have a negative impact on him. The same goes for putting a human in jail.

On the other hand, I take my dog Valentino for drives and for walks in areas much bigger than the yard around my house and I do the same thing for my lions. Does exposing Valentino or the lions to bigger areas make them long to run wild? From what I can see, the answer to that, too, is no.

Lions exist in captivity for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is education. Even if I stopped working in television and film, I would still want to bring school groups to see my animals because I believe firmly in educating young people about the beauty and wonder of wildlife, and the problems facing animals in the wild. Some people would find it ironic that captive lions are needed to highlight the plight of wild ones, but many of the schoolchildren I've seen come through the Lion Park over the years would probably never get to see a lion in the wild in their lifetime. Despite its reputation as a wildlife Eden, South Africa is a very urbanized country with most poor people aspiring to a job and decent housing in a city or large town.

Lions are kept in captivity at facilities such as the Lion Park for
tourism purposes. Not everyone who comes to Africa will have the time, the money, or the inclination to go to the bush, but they will probably want to see a lion. Zoos, too, keep lions as exhibits for educational and tourism reasons.

I see no problem with any of the above reasons for keeping lions in captivity as long as the lions are well cared for and happy. Of course, “happy” and “cared for” are subjective terms. I formed my views on these areas out of my experience first as a visitor, then as someone whose job it was to stimulate and enrich the lives of predators which, no matter your views on this, were destined to live their lives in captivity. What I have found is that my so-called unorthodox ways of relating to and working with lions and other predators have helped me come up with some new, different, and I believe better ways of managing captive animals.

I've noticed over the years that if visitors perceive your animals are happy then they probably are happy.

Take space, for example. The perception in most people's minds is that an animal in a small enclosure is going to be unhappy, which may or may not be true. For me, if I see an animal pacing up and down the fence of its enclosure, whether his cage is four meters by four meters or twenty-five hectares, then I believe there is something wrong.

Lions are funny creatures. A male lion is happy if he has water, food, and sex. If he's happy, it's also highly likely that he will spend most of his time sitting in one spot. One of my white lions, Thor, has a twenty-five-hectare enclosure and he sits in one spot, day after day, under his favorite tree. When the sun shifts and he starts to get hot, he gets up and moves to the shady side of the tree. This is similar behavior to a wild male lion, although they have work to do, patrolling their territory. To simulate this, and to give them some exercise, I rotate the animals between different enclosures. When I
move a lion into an enclosure that's been occupied by hyenas, or even other lions, he will spend time running around marking his territory and sniffing about. It's something to keep him interested. Once he's satisfied that he's staked his claim, he'll sit under a tree quite happily.

We also exercise the lions and take them for walks in the open areas of the park. Once, the lions got more exercise than we expected. Three of us, Helga, a fantastic keeper from the Lion Park whom I call the mother of all cubs because of the number she has raised; Alex the trainer; and I took Thunder and Rain for a walk one day. We left their enclosure and went out in the greater fenced area, where there were wildebeest, zebras, giraffes, impalas, and other harmless game.

This was a new initiative and I suppose some of the others at the park were a bit wary. However, I wanted to enrich the lions by showing them new and bigger areas.

Thunder was talking to me and I was answering him back in lion and in human. “Hello, my boy. You're loving this, aren't you?”

Thunder stopped and raised his nose. He started sniffing. I looked in the direction from which the breeze was coming, across the open plain of gently waving golden grass. On the horizon was a small herd of grazing wildebeest. Thunder was staring intently at them.

“Check,” I said to Helga and Alex, nodding to the lion and the strange creatures that had caught his interest.

Alex shook his head. “No way. These two will never catch a wildebeest. Look at Thunder, he's unfit, and those wildebeest will take off before these two get anywhere near them.”

People—these people who know all about lions—say you can't reintroduce a tame lion in to the wild and teach it to hunt. I looked back at Thunder and he had gone into stealth mode, lowering his tawny body into the matching grass. He was slinking forward. Who had taught him to behave like this? He'd been raised in captivity
and never hunted a single thing in his life. Nor had his mother or father, for that matter. This was innate, instinctive behavior.

“Look at Rain,” Helga said.

She seemed to be getting in on the act, as well, and had speared off in a classic flanking maneuver, or so we thought.

“Zebra,” I said, following Rain's path and eyes. “It's got a foal with it.” Rain clearly had her sights set on different prey and the foal was, I thought, an easier target.

“Thunder!” I hissed. “What are you doing, boy?” He moved a hundred meters ahead of us, through the grass, then broke cover. Breathless, we watched as he charged into the group of unsuspecting wildebeest. They, too, had led a very sheltered life, but they scattered as though their lives depended on it—and they did. Thunder carved a path across the veld as he charged. Through the dust cloud thrown up by galloping hooves, we saw Thunder again. He leapt on to the back of a hapless wildebeest and pulled it down. Within seconds he had his jaws clamped hard around its throat as its hooves flailed at the air.

Thunder killed that thing as though he had done it every day of his life.

Perhaps emboldened by her mate, Rain charged after the zebra. She closed in on the foal, but at the last minute some instinct of its own made the young zebra turn suddenly. Rain tried to follow its track and reached out one massive paw to hook the zebra's hind leg with her claw, but she missed—just. She lost her balance and fell, but was on her feet and crankily shaking the grass and dust from her coat straight after.

The area we were walking in was huge—about two hundred hectares—and the wildebeest and zebra are wild (that is, they have not been hand-reared) so they had a fair chance of escaping Thunder and Rain. I do believe that if we had let Rain try again she would have caught something, but the Lion Park does not work that
way, and that was the end of the experiment of walking lions in the greater park with other game.

Food is an important part of the management of any animal in captivity. At the Lion Park, and in The Kingdom of the White Lion, where my lions now live, we rely heavily on donations from farmers who have lost large animals through natural causes.

We collect dead cows, horses, and pigs, and will shoot animals that need to be euthanized. We don't take animals that have been put down with drugs by a vet because the Lion Park learned the hard way early on that residual chemicals in the flesh of a euthanized animal can kill a cub. Adult lions just get stoned, but it's not good for them. We provide a good service for farmers, who would otherwise have to pay significant sums of money to dispose of dead livestock.

One school of thought in keeping captive lions is that they should be overfed. Some owners believe that a lion with a full belly will be happy and less likely to try and eat a keeper, or escape in search of human or animal prey. I always believed that this was nonsense, and set out to prove that contentment had little to do with being stuffed with food.

Different people I spoke to had different theories about how much lions ate. The most common blanket statement was that a male lion ate 35 kilograms (77 pounds) of meat per week, and a female between 15 and 20 kilograms.

I have always been an astute observer and a meticulous record-keeper. I find I can never have too much information about the animals in my care. No one at the Lion Park could tell me exactly how much the lions were eating. People were guessing and various numbers kept coming up, but no one knew for sure. This was like a red rag to a bull to me.

I began a strict regime of observation and record-keeping. Over
the course of a year, I worked out that a large male lion, such as Thor the white lion, was eating an average total of about 20 kilograms (44 pounds) per week, usually in two sittings. We were feeding twice a week because it would have been quite a chore to cut and prepare meals for all the lions on a daily basis, and because this mimics the frequency with which a lion would feed in the wild.

Over the next year I began experimenting with Thor's food intake, sometimes increasing it and sometimes decreasing it. What I was trying to work out was the correct average intake of food that would allow Thor to maintain a healthy, stable, average weight without losing condition and without detrimental changes to his behavior. It's quite easy to tell when lions are losing weight and condition, as it shows quickly on their hips and ribs, and their hair starts taking on a fuzzy feel and look.

What I found was that Thor needed 17 kilograms (37.4 pounds) of meat per week, which was less than what we had been feeding him and well short of the 35-kilogram minimum portion per week that other people had talked about. I don't think that lions should be kept overweight simply because some people think this makes them less dangerous. No one wants to see a fat lion on a film set, but that wasn't my motivation for experimenting with Thor's diet. I wanted a content, healthy lion in top condition, and that's what I got. I hope that this fact, at least, puts an end to the claims that the only reason I can go into my lions' enclosures and interact with them is because they are overfed. I'll also quite happily go in and play with a lion a minute before he is due to receive his regular feeding. They do not see me as food and their contentment has little to do with being stuffed.

My special relationships with my animals means that managing them on a day-to-day basis is much easier for me than any zookeeper trying to care for his charges anywhere else in the world.

Keeping an enclosure clean is very important, and when it's time for cleaners to come in, I can call my lions and move them all into their night pen. I know from experience that when you try to move a pride of “wild” lions—ones that you can't approach up close—into a cage, one will always resist. Cleaner enclosures mean less flies and disease, but if my lions do develop a problem with flies, I can put ointment straight onto their ears. Not many other keepers could do that without darting the lions.