SHADES & SHAPES OF SECRETS

 

If you have lived a life, you have secrets to tell and secrets to keep.

I have been involved with the world of lions for nearly 10 years. In this time, I have come across every type, shape, and shade of secret. Most of them struck me numb.

In the beginning, I was naïve. I had no idea that people bred lions at all. When I first went to a lion farm, back when I was not even aware that lions were part of my destiny, I watched my friend (she was the lion lover not I), pay to go into the cub section to ‘play’ with the lions. I watched almost with disinterest. I was in the Port Elizabeth area because my eldest daughter was at Woodridge college, but we were at the seaside lion park because my friend Kathy loved lions.

My total lack of understanding continued right into the very midst of the lion breeding world when in 2011 I started helping another friend, this time not a lion lover but the reluctant daughter of a lion farmer, to handle her father’s affairs. It took a little while for it to dawn on me that his affairs contained lions in cages.

What I have learnt:

·        People come out attacking if they are asked sensitive questions.

·        Defensive people are dangerous.

·        If you know too much, you will be threatened so that you remain silent.

There are more bad people involved with the caging, breeding, trading, hunting, boiling, … of lions than there are good people.

This statement might sound obvious to you. But in fact, it took me a long time to take it in. This is because people are still people. They still have families they love, they have faces which look human, they may have warm voices and a sparkling wit, use poetic language and have a cheeky twinkle to their eye. It is not always easy to tell that someone is deceptively suave. Especially when they are suave.

The first hint of the lion industry to filter through my rainbows and white lions mystical haze, was when I was phoned by hunters, PH’s and Outfitters asking to view the ‘goods’. The farm I was on was up for auction, beginning with the forced sale in execution of the 700+ animals including 53 of the 83 lions in the breeding camps.

Smash! The rose-tinted globe I was living under cracked.

The second side of the lion trade to intrude on my ‘McCloud’s Daughters’ life, was the phone call asking me to send another group of cubs to a well known lion facility near Johannesburg. You see, I was using the phone number of the owner of the lion farm, so people were speaking to me as if I knew exactly what was going on, on the farm . It turned out that ‘we’ used to send cubs to this hotel/resort/lion sanctuary so that their guests and volunteers could feed and raise them, then, when the cubs were too old, they would be sent back and exchanged for younger new cubs. The upside, I was told, was that we did not have to pay for the cubs’ food and care.

The third industry-sledge hammer to bludgeon my naivety, was the call from my own friend telling me that a trader would be coming by to collect the body of my dearly beloved lion called Snowman.

Snowman had died in a fight through the fence with 7 young males (yes 7 young males in one enclosure on a breeding farm). The death was in my mind, my fault. I had turned off the electric fence in Snow man and Gaby’s camp because they had cubs in there and the cubs would not survive a 9kw shock. I was still newly in charge of the lion farm and I did not know that the standard practice was to remove cubs from their parents. I did not even know yet, that cubs arrived out of male and female lions living together in the same enclosure. This was my wake-up call. I separated all males and females…but I left Gaby and Snowman’s babies with them…… So Snowman, who I loved, died. He and I had a 5pm ritual, he would meet me, without fail, at 5pm when we would sit on either side of the fence. My family tested this notion of a lion keeping to a time, but whichever way they tried to outsmart Snowman and me, he always left what ever he was doing, even if deeply asleep, at 5pm, and arose to look for me.

I grieved as I arranged the burial under the willow tree. My mother cut a length of mane hair and curled it gently inside a small wooden box for me. My brother drove down to the farm to stand next to me at the grave. The Zulu staff laid a blanket around his still majestic white body. They chanted in low song whilst they layered spadefuls of brown soil over him.

But while we were standing under the willow tree, the trader was at the gate. Her price for his bones had been accepted. In Secret. She was there to load the carcass.

I did not allow her to dig him up, although she offered the weakest of the staff R20k if he would assist her. I fought then and I fought for the next few years. What I did not know, was against whom I fought.

Having learnt of the hunting trade, the cub tourism trade and the bone and fat trade; I was soon to learn about the walking with lions trade. This lesson was taught to me by a large but very thin lion called Beau. He was born on a tourism farm where research was carried out on lions and test tube babies were produced. There was an over abundance of lions at this place, so much so, that it seems the owners were compelled to sell off many of their animals. Beau was trained to walk with strangers, human strangers. He was trained to not eat these strangers. He was trained to not wander off track or take chase after a hare flushed from its shivering spot. He was trained not to lay down under a bush and refuse to leave the shade. He was trained via the use of a taser (which is a non-lethal electroshock weapon used to incapacitate targets via shocks that temporarily impair the target’s physical function). The taser was imbedded in the end of a normal looking wooden walking stick or staff. I did not know how people made lions walk with tourists until I met Beau. One of the men who helped load Beau into the rescue and relocation vehicle, laid his staff on the ground and I saw the usually hidden end of the stick in the video our team took of the relocation. Beau also showed me in his attitude towards sticks. It was my habit to carry a walking stick with me when I went out onto the lands  for purposes of fending off snakes and ostriches. Beau therefore sometimes saw me walking by with this stick in hand. The difference in his reaction to me with the stick compared to when I did not have the stick, was as if he were two different lions. It took me a few weeks to realise, that he also responded negatively to the sun umbrella we sometimes set up within a cluster of tables and benches on a nearby terrace, or to the cleaning staff sweeping the driveway that ran past his camp. Beau would allow me to rub ointment into the mangy patches on his back and he would eat medicine from my hand, but if he heard a sound reminiscent of an electric shock, or he saw a stick, he would leap, in a growling temper, into his little patch of bushy weeds.

I was in town buying a new tractor tyre after Stripey slashed through the wall of our Firestone which had a lifetime guarantee that did not include being ripped open by a lion. I received the call that a lion had died. His name was Clyde. He was a character of note and he was the most aggressive lion on the farm. In fact, we all used to say that if anything were to happen to anyone on the farm, it would be at the paws and claws of Clyde. The irony was that he was my lion. He did not belong to the farm. He (and of course Bonnie) had been placed there temporarily by their owner. The owner had an agreement with the farm, that they could keep half of all the progeny produced by the two lions as payment for their upkeep, but that both Bonnie and Clyde and half of the offspring, remained ‘his property’. When he met me, he signed his lions over to me as actually, deep inside, he wanted the best life for them and had realized that I would give them that.

Clyde died in a fight through the fence. The fence, as you will begin to see, was not properly lion proof. During my years there, we had 8 break outs involving 15 lions and 8 deaths due to the inadequacy of the fence. 7 of the deaths were lions and 1 was a tortoise. The farm had several large Karoo tortoises on it. In a matter of wrong place wrong time, they had been walking across the road when a member of the family who owned the farm happened by in their car and instead (sorry for your plans for the day tortoise), transported the tortoise to the Free State farm. The tortoises spent all their time and effort, trying to head back to their original path, they Houdinied themselves through fences almost on a daily basis. The staff, or I, would load them onto the back of the bakkie and, covered in tortoise pee, take them back to the small internal garden of what was known as Tortoise Cottage. But when one got into a lion camp, and the lions got a hold of it, a game of will or tug of war or who dares would ensue.

Clyde’s body had no outwardly obvious signs of injury. I ran my hands over him, my fingers feeling for moist blood or kinky bones. My fingers found nothing. It was as if I were caressing the gentlest of sleeping lions. But then I saw the puncture wound. Dry and clean, a single claw had severed the spinal cord. The once fearsome Clyde was quiet.

Knowing a lion and then having him die was a revelation. The bigger the lion, the more unbelievable was the lack of life once he was still. There were no more adult lions killed through the fence. But there were a few small cubs that clambered under the gaps and there was Smilla.

Smilla was one of 4. Her parents were Tonga and Mo. She was born within the first 1 and a half months of my life on the farm. Before I separated males and females. Before I learnt of the horrors of the indiscriminate increase in lion population in captivity and what it means.

When I arrived at the farm, I had been fed an entire doctrine, disguised as a doctorate, by the farm’s owner who pretended to me that he was, as his father before him, a qualified veterinarian. He was convincing in his belief that he was breeding lions in order to keep a pure genetic pool of lions available for breeding with wild lions in the future. Even though I was yet to learn that there was no genetic imperative and no need to help the wild lions by breeding captive lions, it only took me 2 months to see that we still needed to stop breeding due to the obvious problem of how we were going to house a population that could expand by up to 70 lions in one year. I was almost instantly able to see that even if the plan was to protect these bloodlines, in order to do that, only a very few lions needed to breed and only then, every few years, not every few months. My calculations were based on the fact that I was seeing the bred lions as permanent residents whom we had a duty to love and protect for the rest of their lives.

The four were called the S Girls. Short for the Swedish Pride. I had Swedish family visiting. My cousin-in-law is a vet nurse and animal lover. She and her mother named the Swedish girls, Smilla, Sapphire, Lilla Stina and Siva.

Within the first 3 months of me being at the farm, 18 cubs were born to mothers who did not look after them. There were 13 others whose mothers were fantastic, and going against normal protocol for the farm, I left them with their prides. The S Girls were moved into my and my children’s cottage. We bottle fed them every 20 minutes at first, eventually moving them in incremental nudges, towards a 4 hourly feeding pattern. Siva lagged behind the others. She was slow to take a bottle and slow to poo. When the S Girls graduated to an outdoor enclosure, Siva lived in a corner away from the others. She trembled and dug vainly away from the others. Whereas Smilla was the brave one. The leader, the alpha girl, the shining star.

During the raising of the S girls, a visitor inadvertently brought Calici Virus into our cottage. My middle child, Shanéad, and I, nursed the S girls through this deadly virus but we lost two younger, under 2 weeks old, cubs to upper respiratory tract infection. They both, after days of me suctioning and massaging their chests, died, drowning in their own mucus.

The S Girls survived. They grew up and moved into a camp alongside of our garden. Three of them thrived, whilst Siva ailed. At one time Siva became poisoned, by what we do not know. I had the men pull out all weeds in case they were noxious, close any ground holes in case of snakes, cut off the skin of all meat we fed her in case the skin still carried a trace of dip on it. I gave her charcoal and arsen alb, I slept with her inside her camp for 5 days. She lived, my little awkward Siva, the odd bod girl who walked with an S bend and stumbled when she meant to stride.

Yet Smilla, the brave and strong one, was the one to die whilst I was still on that farm. She, overconfidently, explored under the fence line into Cinnabar and Malaika’s camp. She was killed on Christmas day 2012. My mother called me. I was at a Christmas lunch and my mother was the one who walked up and down in a grid pattern looking for Smilla’s body. Elias spotted her inside the neighbouring camp. Her head and tail still intact.

Shanéad and I buried the two small calici virus cubs out on the land. Shanéad read them poems she had composed for them. We buried the poems, flowers and their blankies with them. We collected damp stones wet with our tears and heaped them over the little graves to ward off jackals. My mother had Smilla’s remains buried before Shanéad and I could see them.

A lion cub called Lennon was killed by his father Ice, whilst Lennon’s brother Luke had his tail nearly torn off. Taai’s sister died crawling under a fence into Zimba’s camp.

I was devastated by the deaths of the lions I cared for, yet these were lion on lion deaths or viruses. Were these not natural? I do not know. The thing is we humans put the lions into camps, we touched the cubs, we constructed the fences.

In the wild, more cubs die than survive. The mortality rate amongst wild lions is high. Yet we were, well I was, responsible for the lions who died under my care.

Just before I arrived at that farm, some lionesses had died whilst being sedated. They woke up and drowned trying to escape the fully awake lions in the enclosure. Another lion climbed a tree trying to escape a cell mate already fully awake. Months after I left, Siva, my love, died trying to give birth when she should never have been bred with. I heard that Blue, my half blind boy, died due to incorrect sedation doses. And the deaths went on…. Lions sold for hunting. Lions bred for their skeletons. Maybe some one is walking over the carpet skin of my lovely lion Bonnie….

I learnt so much. I learnt too much.

The breeding of lions in captivity is done with one goal in mind…how much will the owner gain from the death of the lion. I later learnt, from the same trader I had been so busy fighting off at gates, that she was called in to that farm, after I left, to sell off more lions, this time not just lions who I knew by name, but lions whom I loved more than I loved life itself.

The trader told me the detailed account of the lionesses who had drowned before I arrived on the farm. She gave me the invoice my friend had issued for their body parts and the proof of payment my friend received for their bodies.

The trader taught me a lesson I had not yet learnt. She told me how owners do not actually put microchips into the lions. The secret, she said, was to keep them in a drawer, so the owners had the numbers, and they used them on permits, but this way, they could move several lions on the same permit, only having to reapply for a new permit if the permit expired or somehow, they were stopped and monitored by a policeman.

During this secretive meeting with the trader, I learnt about the way lions are dropped off at canned hunts. She explained the secret behind the operation. She had nothing to hide from me, the reason the meeting was secretive was that she did not want people in ‘the industry’ knowing that she was fraternizing with a lion lover. I was the embarrassment. I the one who had to hide my face.

The thing about arriving out of the blue into someone’s existing business, is that there are ways, protocols, agendas, plans, daily routines and an existing product being produced and sold. It is only because I was naïve, therefore undeservedly brave, that I managed to make any changes at all. After it was all said and done, someone close to me said, well you fucked up that business, and he meant it as a bad thing. The people who surround the business I had intruded into, even those of a remote position, servicing the business in small ways like providing internet or re-gassing the fridge, these people all know the ways of that business and they all accept it as normal. When a woman, an English speaking woman from the Cape, drops in and starts pulling the business apart, it is not taken lying down.

I had resistance. I had to prove to my friend that what I was doing for her father’s farm was better for her in the long run. That she would find something to be proud of instead of disassociating herself in embarrassment. I had to somehow promise that there would be enough money to run on and that, most importantly of all, there was hope instead of the sale in execution which was barrelling inevitably down onto her father’s business.

It didn’t happen overnight. The trader I spoke of earlier, had a signed contract with my friend’s father, she was officially running the farm and she had 23 of her own lions living there. In order for me to end breeding and selling, she had to pack up and leave. This entailed taking her lions. She first had to build them somewhere to go. Then she came and took the lions I had been feeding and caring for, slowly, incrementally over the next 6 months. There went Le Croc, there Ella. Nancy. Jojo. Aquila. Rex. Shanti. Max and then Maluti, the one I was never meant to fall in love with.

Years later when the trader and I had that secret meeting in Clarens, she proudly told me that Maluti had turned out so well, I would have been, she exclaimed, so proud of him; she had managed to swap him for 10 cubs in a deal with a farmer near Kimberely.

The lions were always just part of a business. Quantum, livestock, collateral. The owner of the farm I was trying to change, had a debt with his erstwhile best friend, who in turn had a debt with a hunting friend. The erstwhile best friend owned one of the lionesses at the farm. She had four cubs, two older males and two tiny chaps fathered by one of her elder sons. When I sought money to build another enclosure so we could separate the lioness from her sons, I was directed to ask the erstwhile best friend for money as the lioness was his. The best friend solved the solution in a fashion completely normal in that world; he gave the two little cubs to his hunter friend in lieu of his debt. The hunter friend never asked if they were male or female, he didn’t particularly want them instead of actual money, but the slapping of backs and rock-hard handshakes were the order of the day amongst men and ‘bakgat’, so the deal was done. I however, still sat with the lioness and her older two sons. I temporarily moved a single lion into the smallest camp we had, actually a passageway and shuffled everyone over so that we could not have another inbreeding (or any breeding) incidents. The only good thing to almost come out of this was that the best friend was so annoyed, he signed over ownership of his lioness to me. I never actually got ownership because this world of lion owners giving away lives willy nilly mostly as bribes, also includes the withholding of lions as enticement, leverage or revenge.

There were visits from unknown people back in the first few months. I would get a call from someone at the gate, or sometimes, someone already up at the house. My friend quickly telling me that so and so needed to do such and such on the farm, would I be a darling and do her a kindness by entertaining so and so, or allowing them to walk about, or any number of civil actions a good host might afford a visitor. One of these visitors took photos of the lions, for a tourism article, later my friend asked me to pen in names of the lions next to his photos, later I saw she had added prices next to each named photo. Photos of individual lions who lived and breathed and roared around me. One of the visitors introduced himself to me as Shortie, his friend Cecil. I offered Shortie and Cecil a cold drink. They told me that our lions were ugly and that they did not, after all, wish to buy any. I spilled the cold drinks.

It took awhile to start looking at every single person who had anything even vaguely to do with the farm, even so much as to live within the same province, as suspect. But I eventually did. I became isolated and paranoid. I was ready to fight everyone. I may have learnt a lot from the people in the lion industry, but more than that, I had learnt to be a whole new me from the lions themselves.