LOVE LIONS ALIVE by Andi Rive

  Two things… 1)     1)   Is it not truly amazing that one can think: “oh... let me write down this thought”, and one reaches for a flat metallic item, opens it and begins typing to the world? 2)     2)    I am busy watching a cooking programme. In fact I watch every cooking programme that I can find. Yet I do not really cook. I do not have more than a camp kitchen and even before living in a tent, as my children will attest, I only cooked because I had to keep them and my animals alive. Except on special occasions when I would apply myself. The program I am busy watching is about chefs from different countries and styles of cooking. Every expression is celebrated. From cookie milk to crème Brulé. Granita, brioche, and springbok potjie. My mind wonders to my world (this being the world of lions and sanctuaries). I think about the respect shown between various chefs and styles of cooking. Pastry chefs nodding to sushi chefs. Sugar arti...

  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...

You can be anything in life that you want to be. An open ended idea which gives everyone hope and kills them at the same time. What unbridled pressure? Oscillation, duality and juxtaposing beliefs accurately describe my personality. I am a really calm person at the same time as being in a constant state of anxiety. I wake up inside a cosy, snug fog of grey but within seconds my mind is abuzz with thousands of flashing images, my stomach fills with bile, poisonous panic swamps me. I dread the light of day. Yet I have found my passion. I love my life with lions. So there it is, the dichotomy of Andi Rive. What I am doing is really important stuff to the lions in my care, but it is also very basic. In fact, the daily drudge of life with lions includes …. - Fetching carcasses, cutting up carcasses, throwing cut up pieces onto the back of the bakkie, moving the pieces from the slaughter area to the storage area then either loading the pieces into bags to be frozen or applying supple...

Bolts are are being bolted and keys turned in locks. The people of South Africa are locking themselves inside their homes as of today. In our case it is a matter of zipping up the tent. I can hear the lions romping and running, their feet pounding on the earth the sound reverberates through the canvas walls. I hear two of them have a tussle, lion moans turn into a few quick growls answered by snarls. Lions do this, they have spats, the thing is that spats from large cats are more intense in sound than that usually heard in alleys. But it is quickly over and the snarls evolve into roars. The royal proclamation is take up by surrounding lions and within seconds, 6 of the lions are in full roar. The baboons answer in a frenzy of screeches. I can hear rocks hitting rocks as the baboons throw smaller ones down onto the boulders below. Birds of a dozen varieties whistle and sing. In fact, as I listen I am amazed at the number of sounds I can here from my lock down spot in the tent. There ...

Let's talk about cubs. They are not pets. Not one single cub should be bred by humans to live a life in captivity. Even if we provide them with hectares of space and give them the highest level of treatment, THEY DO NOT BELONG BEHIND FENCES. Not one more cub! There is no excuse, no legitimate reason, no genetic imperative and no conservation value for breeding cubs in captivity. The lions that already exist in captivity need to be taken care of by us humans in the best way possible. It is criminal that lions are in captivity in the first place, without exacerbating the problem by producing more lions. In my book I look deeply into the mentality behind the breeding of lions into captive situations and the type of people who subject wild animals to lives behind fences. There are people out there who have chosen to keep lions in captivity, who have created breeding facilities and who believe in a policy of imprisoning others for the glorification of self. These people are...

I live in a tent on the side of a mountain. I built a sanctuary for lions in a place where there is no house for me. I have been up here for 29 months now. When I first came up here, Mela was only 6 months old. She, my dog and I lived up here on our own.  Odin the young lion about to get up to mischief   I borrowed Leon's caravan thinking I would use it for 3 months at most, but I ended up living in the caravan for 13 months until moving into a tent. I was already familiar with camping and very attached to the caravan as Leon and I often went away to beautiful places, dragging it behind us every where that we went. Many times when I had to work on the weekends we would only set off on a Sunday afternoon and we would pitch camp a few kilometers away from home on the Wilge River or at Sterkfontein dam for the night, only to pack up  the canoe and the caravan at 6am the next morning  so we could both get back in time for Mo...

PART 1 of CUBS THROUGH MY LIFE On the 10th day of December 2011 Five stars fell into my life and my life was changed forever. I had never looked after lions before that time. I had not dreamed of caring for lions, not harboured a desire to do so nor ever planned to try to do so. The birth of the STAR Pride was an unheralded but totally fortuitous event. Nursing Tindra Sienna as a newborn The first 2 STARS where born on the morning of the 10th December to a mother called Shanti. She had been in a fight and was flat on her side, bleeding profusely when she gave birth prematurely to a tiny female cub. The first one had already been birthed when Taiga and I got to Shanti. I had been walking out on the land. I had risen at sunrise with a nagging question eating away at me. Should I stay at the lion farm or should I go home to the Cape as planned? We had only come to the farm to help for 2 weeks and were due to leave the following morning. I would be leaving the farm with...

Let me tell you about Carl... On a walk in the mountain Looking out over the valley Would I be prepared to take a lion cub of approximately 7 weeks of age who was a pet to a woman who could not deal with this lion as it turned out that he scratched and he bit? On July 12th 2016 he was transported to a farm an hour away from me and 3 hours away from where he lived. He traveled in a cat box (domestic cat size). I arrived at the meeting point and lifted him out of his box, I snuggled him into my arms and told him, 'don't you worry little one, I've got you'. I asked the lady why he was so pale, she replied in an incredulous tone that it was because he was a white lion...Dha, how could I not know that, but the thing was, he was so dirty I had honestly not been able to tell that he was white, I had questioned his lack of cub spots and stripes, but thought him to be tawny. Later that day I began washing him with warm water as I held him closely in my lap. It...