LOVE LIONS ALIVE by Andi Rive

  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...

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...