LOVE LIONS ALIVE by Andi Rive

How we categorize animals has a profound impact on how we treat them. Familiarity with a certain animal brings with it different feelings about that animal. Some people love camels, others are completely disinterested in them. To some, rabbits are pets but lambs are food. You can only behave within the framework of your own experience. Be it learnt through hands-on real life experience; or acquired through movies, books and internet; or handed down through cultural norms and standards. There do, of course, exist categories, way outside of your own boundaries of experience. For example, how do you see a lion? To someone out there, a lion is a beast who could devour his livelihood, therefore the lion is an impediment towards him being able to afford his upcoming marriage. Someone else sees a lion as an ordinary sighting along his everyday route to work. There are those who take guests to photograph lions in their safari vehicles, they see lions as valuable alive, as it keeps on g...

  I am sitting in my bed in my tent. It is still outside, I can hear the varying speeds of the pitter pattering of small critters scurrying across the roof of my tent and the floor boards of my kitchen deck. It has been extraordinarily windy for the past few days and the silent contrast now that the canvas flapping and branches scratching has stopped, has me straining to hear every tiny sound. I am alone up here (well as in the only human) because Line is on the Limpopo farm where she met Dr Caldwell and went flying off to vaccinate and administer contraception to our giraffes. Being alone after the windstorms, comes along with a whole multi-layered listening experience. I can hear jackal calling from two different directions, I hear aardvarks tuttering, I hear jaguars ratcheting and an owl woowing. The silence is enhanced by the absence of the inverter which I could not get started up tonight. I tried and tried with a tenacity I wished someone were around to witness, but I faile...

Lions. I do not feel that I can sit here in my tent and begin to write down a description which can in any way do justice to lions. Their strength is not just physical, you should see how they carry the burdens imposed on them. Seeing as I live surrounded by lions in 'cages', it is a subject close to my heart. Lions (jaguars and pumas), should not be living behind fences. So, if they are, how do we bring as much dignity to their lives as possible. Adding quality to lives which have been captured. Most of you know about the dedication we put into our enclosures and how we prioritise proper and beautiful design. We give them warmth in the form of sheltering boulders, long grass, bushes, trees and man-made shelters. But do you know that if they are not fed correctly, they can not make proper use of these. Right now I am really cold, I am sitting on a furry rug next to a gas heater. It is the middle of the day and the winter sun is shining bright. The air however is ice cold. Not t...

"(He) waited for 2 days in (the city) so that he could go to the circus, he endured those days only for the joy that he imagined he'd see when he saw real lions, he would tell me years later. But on the day when he went to the circus...his seat in the front row, first the elephant came up, when the audience clapped, my mamma noticed that (he) was gradually losing his vitality and excitement at being there at seeing an animal that he had assumed would be monumental. And it was indeed the largest animal that (he) had ever seen, but as big as it was, as (he) told me later, in truth what had a profound impact on him was that the elephant was dying, that it barely moved, that its colour was not as it was supposed to be and that it was showing more ribs than one would expect. The elephant was dying from sadness and imprisonment and the worst thing was that nobody seemed to notice. They kept making it raise one leg and then another. They made it complete one lap of the ring with a wo...

blow by blow. (Because nobody reads my blog, I can speak freely about this). It all begins with a phone call, a WhatsApp or a Facebook message. It is a simple matter of a few words shared, usually between strangers. It starts off small. A mere notion. Have you seen the post about the starving lions? There is a lion in a zoo. There is a cat in a cage. There are cubs being exploited in a circus. Can you help? We can. The reason we can, is because we, Line and I, have built a sanctuary for the express purpose of giving lions from formerly compromised lives, new homes. We see many photos of animals in all sorts of terrible conditions, we are inundated with the most horrible pictures of heinous crimes against animals. On a daily basis our hearts hurt, our minds real and our humanity cries silently in objection. “someone has to do something about this”, we say. Then we see a lion. We know lions, we love lions, we look after lions. We can do something about that lion...

And all that Jazz... Jazz is a little cross breed of Staffie and Border Collie blend. She came from the Animal shelter in Harrismith in 2014 after her stray mother had been fatally hit by a car and she and her siblings delivered via cesarean section.   Jazz is 2 weeks older than Taai, but being a dog, and not a lion, she has always been smaller. The size difference was not as disparate though, when they were still two babies sharing a dog basket. Jazz successfully chewed her basket into pieces and then proceeded to move into Taai’s bed with him. She used her nips and Border Collie genes to herd him and stay on top. Sometimes she even sat on top of him literally. We would laugh at this saying to ourselves that it would not last as the lion outgrew the dog, but it lasted, even when Taai was a sub-adult, he and Jazz carried on as if they thought they were twins. They sat bolt upright alongside of each other on the back seat of the car, their heads at a similar level. They ...

Part 1 - Going to Ukraine to get them....                  (Lockdown Day 8) We went to fetch them from Ukraine. I had made a list of what I needed to pack for the trip it sat alongside of lists of what we still needed to do to get the lion enclosures ready to house them. I had a Materials list of hardware and tools. I had, To Do lists, divided into Critical (cannot bring lions if not done), Must be done (but not absolutely vital it be done by us, if we ran out of time, possible to leave to Thokozane and James to do while we are away) and Will need to be done (has to happen but could be attended to once the lions were here). I had lists of who was to do what. I had lists of the what was to happen on the day of arrival and in what order it should happen. I had lists in my big black book and lists which I sent out to everyone concerned and lists printed to be placed in rooms or handed out to those who needed them. Before we knew it, we w...

In Lockdown with Lions   ZEBRA PUZZLE We have a jigsaw puzzle of a dazzle of zebras which we planned to do during our quiet lockdown evenings. It lies on top of my chest of drawers under the Mx5 paintball rifle and a pair of binoculars, it is still tightly wrapped in its plastic jacket. We bought it to keep ourselves gently distracted from stress during lockdown.  I had also planned to write a bit on this blog every day during lockdown, because we would have so much free time. I romantically pictured myself and this laptop atop a boulder looking out at the expansive view, or tucked up in the shade under a bush alongside the lions or even typing away at the fireside with a cup of hot chocolate in the star filled evenings. What I had failed to consider was the fact that the only thing that really changes at the sanctuary because of no guests being able to visit, is the 100% cessation of an income. Other than that everything carries on as per usual. Everyda...

My chest is tight and I have a cough, it is more of a throat cough than a chest couch, it only lasts for an hour or 2 in the early hours of the morning and is accompanied by sneezing. It is clearly only the beginnings of an ordinary cold. But I am not at all happy with this situation.  I have not come into contact with many people in the past 6 days as the whole country is in lockdown.  On the last day out before Lockdown, we went to town because we had just read on the farmers’ group that all farmers should get a signed letter from the Farmers’ Union declaring us to be farmers and therefore engaged in critical activities. We had to present our copy of the letter to Advocate George Galloway at the Farmers Co-op where he would be sitting to sign from 10am to 11am on Thursday. But first we had to type and print our individual letter which was amended to specify our work as being that of "Lion Carers". In order to type and print, we had to go to our local computer s...

RESPECT FOR NATACHA I cannot even imagine what Nachi used to see, feel and hear during her life in a travel crate in the circus. What did the people who handled her, who passed her from one tourist to the next; minute after minute after minute, smell like? Where they hot and sweaty? Perfumed? Did they smell of other animals, hotdogs and cotton candy? What does human supremacy smell like? Did they croon to her in soft loving voices or ignore her whilst loudly chatting to each other? What did she hear when they were raising the Big Top or when they had packed up, ready to drive to the next circus location? Men shouting, workers whistling, poles clattering, canvas flapping, metal rattling? I can guess that she saw new sights all of the time. But wait, did she, or was her crate inside a vehicle whilst they traveled? When the circus decamped, was her cage set between canvas walls in an alleyway of guy ropes? Did all the different tourist hands, eyes and faces blur into ...