LOVE LIONS ALIVE by Andi Rive

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 ...

5 YEARS WITH MELA (Lockdown Day 4) “Mela Bella baby lion” I call and wait a few seconds as I do not know where she is in her enclosure. A bush begins to shake and I look towards it as she bursts out of the leaves running to me. She is licking her lips and mewling in short whao whao moans. Mela was born on the 29th March 2015. It was a Sunday and I was in Johannesburg having my broken arm attended to (That is another whole story involving a fractured cheek and other miscellaneous breaks). Taiga phoned me in the morning exclaiming that there was a cub in Ariel’s enclosure. I was concussed and struggled to compute this as there was no way that there could be a cub in Arial’s enclosure, “what?” I asked “there is a cub in Ariel’s enclosure, it is alone, it is just sniffling around in the grass. Thulani called me to come and see it, I had heard what I thought was a cub screaming early this morning but theen I just thought it was impossible, what must I do?” “There can’t be a c...

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...