THE HARD TRUTH

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. WE can give that lion a loving home.

But we cannot do it alone. How do we even begin to know where that particular cage is? In what exact place in space that lion is suffering? We live in a tent on the side of a mountain in the Eastern Free State of South Africa. The lions in the pictures are in places we don’t even know exist, they are in war zones, they are in places so foreign to us that 5 seconds after we first see the photo, we scroll past relegating the image to the unreality of social media, far, so far from the places our real lions inhabit. 

But once in a while someone from those foreign places contacts us and says… can you do the ‘looking after the lions for the rest of their lives part’? Well yes, that part we can do.

What we can do is we can make homes for them. We can pace out fence lines, choosing which rock to include, dreaming that an actual lion will be able to climb on top of it. We can measure out areas taking into account which tree the lions will ultimately find shade beneath.  We can walk through the veld planning exactly where the cat’s paws will step. “Look” we say, “they can run here. And romp there. Look” we exclaim, “if we take the fence just here, they will walk into this top area and not see the fence at all. Look here, they will be able to walk down to this rocky outcrop and when they look back at the mountain they will not see the top fence.” “Yes”, we hammer the marker into the ground, “let’s put it here, this will be beautiful, they will like it here.”

We can dig holes to form drinking pools. We can carry poles and mix cement. We can create and we can design, we love nothing more than to plan the best forever homes the lions could ever have. We are a lion sanctuary, we love lions, we want them to have the opportunity to express as many of their natural behaviour as possible. Within the constraints of captivity, we want nothing less than to give them room for as much behavioral flexibility as two human ladies can give to animals who should never have been living at the mercy of little creatures such as us.

The truth of the matter is that we are only one aspect in this whole story. We live with the animals and we care for them for the rest of their lives. We spend hours every day driving out through the reality of the South African landscape to collect dead carcasses from out of the sun drenched veld or wind swept rocky crevices. We take axes in hand to chop through bones, we wield knives and slice up cows that roamed yesterday but will feed lions today. We load meat onto the back of our truck in the pouring rain and we pack the meat into sacks to freeze by late night torch light. We add vitamin and mineral supplements as per the specific instructions from our vet for each individual lion’s needs, every day, without fail, no matter how bone weary we are that day. We fix fences in the ice cold morning and we remove sun-bleached bones in the midday glare.

Cooking on a fire of ouhout wood, listening to the lions crunching on bones from meat we have just spent back breaking hours fetching and preparing for them, is a life lived to its full. Going to sleep to the accompaniment of lions roaring is our daily reward. Knowing that the lions that we saw in those godawful photos are now walking in the dark of our very own night behind those bushes just right over there, fills our senses with a lust for life. 

“Hear them, that’s Luke roaring. Listen, can you hear them running? They are active tonight, it’s because there's a big moon. Lions are always more active in the moonlight. Well unless they are standing in a cage.”

Behind it all however, is a whole heap of paperwork and admin. The truth is this life spent in nature comes on the back of paper.

Money. Permits. Leases. Contracts. Permission. Ownership. Registration…. Telephones that work. Internet that connects. Electrical devices with charged batteries. Desks out of the rain.

Time to keep a handle on all of the paperwork as well as care for the lions on the ground is the toughest of all the quick-aging tasks I have. There is this stress that lives just beneath the surface of my every minute. Time ticking past. Minutes flowing into days into weeks.

There was no way that we would ever have said no to taking in the lions from Ukraine, Frida, Diya, Demira and Luke. We saw the photos of them caged in the Ukraine and we said yes. The very instant that Lionel reached out to us, we were committed. We would make it happen no matter what. We are only two people, but we exist within a world full of lion lovers. We would bring the physical reality of lion care to these lions, working in, what we believed, would be a team. We had believed that there were organizations out there (as in anywhere other than on this mountain) who were to run fundraisers. We started out thinking that there were people who could not themselves physically house and feed the lions, who were going to help us with the funds so that we could do the physical side of lion care.

No matter, when push came to shove we set up our own fundraising initiative. When enough money did not come in to employ a fencing team to build the requisite lion habitats, we picked up our own spades and began digging. No problem, we could work at night 7 days a week because the ability to buy the materials came in spurts unaligned to the timeline we had laid out for the building.

“See it as a workout” Line said, motivating me to keep on going when every muscle burned.

“What about the usual schedule of tasks?” we asked ourselves…We’ll get back onto those just as soon as the Ukrainian lions are here and settled. “ok, well except for the feeding, we can do that when its dark, we don’t need daylight to feed.”

We could postpone most of our normal tasks, apart from cutting the grass along the fence lines. That could not wait. We had to take a week out of the building schedule to catch up on cleaning fence lines. 

"But we can make it up if we can get two extra people to help us for 2 weeks”.

“Can we afford that?”

“No but we can save money by using our own camp battery for the fence and only buy a new one once the lions are safely here.”

“Live in the dark until the money comes in to buy ourselves a camp battery? Ok, we can do that for the lions”

“Andi”, Line said, “we absolutely have to recoup once the lions are here”

“yes Line, we will get everything back on track once the lions are here”

“We can sleep once the lions are here”

“We can pay our normal bills once we have finished paying for the new enclosures”

“let’s just get this done and then we can catch up with ourselves”

“yes, we can do it, head down, shoulders to it, let’s make this happen because those lions have to get out of those cages and walk here in this veld”

“yes”

Just as it looked like we would fit all the work into the remaining time span before the lions arrived, Phuku needed urgently to be moved out from under some or other poacher's nose. The other lions at her facility were killed and she desperately needed to get to a place of safety. We could do it. We just needed to reshuffle our time. We decided to put Phuku into one of our large management enclosures, the one between the Stars and Beau and Taai. She could stay there until the Ukrainian lions were safely here. We planned that once all the lions were safely here, we’d build her a new enclosure. But life happened and it was not going to work out that she remain in the management area for another month, we needed to build somewhere for her to live up at the top and we had to do that immediately.

“It’s Okay, no problem, We can fit it into our schedule if we just don’t have Christmas and we cut out washing the vehicles and doing laundry and visiting town. Yes we can do it”

 Line’s parents came out to help us build an enclosure for Phuku and they kindly funded the purchase of the materials we needed.

A few months before, just as we had begun to build the Ukrainian enclosures, a runaway fire swept through the mountains and valleys around us, burning everything outside of the existing LLA lion enclosures. The fire came within 1 meter of our living camp. Time wise, that had set us back significantly because we had lost all of our plumbing systems and a good deal of equipment stored in a an old shipping container that stood across the track from the lion area. The new poles we'd bought for the enclosures also burnt. We eventually received insurance money for most of the losses, but time wise we were pulled off of the Ukrainian job as we rebuilt and fixed up after the fire. We used the knowledge of the insurance money to take a loan to complete the building of the Ukrainian lion’s shelters and then when it arrived, we used the insurance payout for the repayment of the loan.

We had to. If the lions did not have homes waiting for them, they simply would not have been able to come here.

Ultimately we brought in the amount of money we had estimated the Ukrainian lion enclosures would cost, but we did not realise the actual amount that it had cost us. Our fundraising task had in itself cost us in time and deep stress. The usual donations which normally helped towards everyday running costs had been given as ‘rescue’ donations. It was clear to see that the donors got way more excited about donating towards the rescue of a lion than the life care of that lion. Or, if I am wrong, then donors gave to those who spent the most time asking for donations. And in this, we were and will always be 10 steps behind, because we simply spend too much time looking after the lions. 

Herein lies one of my dilemmas. I absolutely want LLA to be self sufficient and I see it as a weakness that we need to rely on income from 'begging'. That is why we have the volunteer program in which people who would dearly like to be living lives looking after lions, as we do, but who actually have other lives, careers and homes, get to live with us for a short period of time for a fee, which we then use for running the sanctuary. The Volunteer business is supposed to cover normal running costs whilst extra ordinary expenses like the building of new enclosures for the new comers, is done via the help of Outside Orgs. My dilemma is that if I reach out and say how very much we need help with keeping the lion sanctuary properly running, if I say how much employing two members of staff would help us, if I come clean about the difficulties of not being able to run a well oiled project because we are constantly playing catch up...we will look like losers.

but if I do not say that we need financial help, the animals lose out.

((PS, all our volunteers for 2020 have cancelled due to Covid19))

And then the Bloemfontein rescue came about.... We were phoned and those first few words passed between us and the SPCA. Just words, an idea, a notion, based upon a very real and compelling fact that 4 cats were in urgent need of home.... Line got a loan for LLA from Norway to fund this as we literally had 3 days to prepare for the initial arrival of the cats. Once they were safely here, we immediately jumped in to building them species specific enclosures, designed respectively for Pumas and Jaguars. 

We could only make the decision to house these cats if we could independently fund it as we had already seen the difficulty of ever-so-slowly bringing in a trickle of funds for the costs of housing new cats.  But we had to do it. We are Love Lions Alive Sanctuary. We are Line and Andi. We live to give forever homes to cats in distress. This is our reason for existence....which leads me to launch into the last of my dilemmas (for this blog anyway), after I say the following aside (((We received immediate hostility from factions who believed that LLA was not allowed to use 'Ukrainian lion funds' for other cats. Umm, we were not using Ukrainian funds. More to the point, we had used our own money and our own sweat and tears to cover the shortfall of the Ukrainian lion enclosures. And where does one draw the line between funds raised for the Ukrainian lions' rescue versus housing versus feeding versus medication versus every single thing we pay to keep them alive and well?))). 

Back to Dilemma number 2>

The constant rescuing of Big Cats from captive places has the potential to become yet another business based off of the exploitation of animals. THEREFORE

We have to remain vigilant that money is not made through the business of moving captive animals from one place to another without a finite point being achieved. We have to watch our emotions when we receive those awful photos. We have to think hard and listen well when those first few words are spoken..."can you help these cats?"

Where do they come from? how did they get into that position? will others take their place? Are they cubs? Who bred them? Who sold them? (for all these lost and forgotten cubs were not given as gifts to their erstwhile owners) Who needs the empty cage they will leave unoccupied once they move to sanctuary?

It is vital that we distinguish between cats who will be saved by coming to LLA and those whose 'rescue' will only perpetuate the business. As sad and horrible as this is. Only the cessation of breeding will bring an end to their lives in captivity. A zoo must be permanently closed for the rescue of zoo animals to be a success. I know that every animal who gets to move from a cage to a sanctuary has been upgraded, but I fear for the animal who takes that one's place. That is why the hundreds and thousands of farm reared lions in SA are not being 'rescued' by ethical sanctuaries.

End of Blog. time to feed the lions, and jaguars and pumas who rely on us even though they are so much more capable of survival than we are... Oh I see another dilemma brewing...