Neptune Arabella
Obi Lalla Pardus
Raise and Arabella
Oliver and Obi
FIVE WEEKS VOLUNTEER IN A WILDLIFE SANCTUARY FOR BIG CATS IN SOUTH AFRICA
Donca Vianu
‘From the beasts, I am the lion.’
Krishna to Arjuna Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 10, sl. 30
After my discovery the previous year that communication with animals is possible, I looked up the website of the South African wildlife sanctuary Jukani, where Anna Breytenbach had talked with the black leopard Spirit with such dramatic consequences. The website mentioned the possibility of working there as a volunteer.
So I contacted Jukani: could I come as a volunteer?
No, I could not — they have an age limit which I had surpassed by twenty years.
Could they recommend another place where I might be accepted?
Yes: Panthera Africa. A newly opened big cat sanctuary in South Africa, in Stanford, 145 km from Cape Town.
And so I ended up registering, at the end of May 2015, for a volunteer residency at Panthera Africa, to start six months later, when in Europe it is cold winter and in Africa bright summer.
I had never been to Africa, had never worked as a volunteer, and knew nothing about wildlife sanctuaries. I had a vague idea that they resemble a natural park — animals rescued from zoos, as Spirit had been, protected from human interference by law. The thought of seeing lions, tigers, leopards, and caracals in their own habitat enticed me, as did the prospect of playing with their cubs.
My husband Sanjay and I both remembered the lion Christian, whom John Rendall and Anthony Bourke had bought at Harrods and later released into the African wilderness with the help of George Adamson. Perhaps I too would bond with a lion cub who would be overjoyed to see me again years later.
The way humans treat domestic animals drives me to despair. When I first learned, many years before, about the vivisection practised across pharmaceutical, medical, cosmetic, and chemical research, the amount of pain I felt was unbearable. It made me ill. The pain is still there. I thought that wild animals might bring some consolation. At least wild animals are not tortured in laboratory experiments, or subjected to the fate of animals in the meat industry. The majority of them roam proudly and freely across the African savannas. There are poachers, hunting especially elephants for their tusks, but they are punished when caught. To play with lion and leopard cubs who live protected and free, as I had seen in pictures of wildlife reserves — that would heal wounds and restore faith in an orderly universe.
One week before the flight to Cape Town, I joined a seminar with Laila del Monte, to learn from her how to communicate with animals at the first level. The previous winter I had read many books on this topic, and I liked Laila del Monte’s the most: it had depth, structure, and style. I had watched her documentary twice and thought her wonderful — and when I met her, I was not disappointed. She is wonderful: beautiful, tender, strong, gracious, ethical, and very perceptive. The tools she offered in the seminar were ones I believed I would be able to use.
Armed with this freshly acquired knowledge, I embarked on the new adventure.
In Dubai I said a tearful goodbye to Sanjay, who flew on to India, while I boarded a plane to Africa almost at the same moment. After a journey of thirty hours in total, on the morning of 6 December 2015, I landed in Cape Town.
Someone from the sanctuary would be waiting for me.
And someone was: Berna, one of the two permanent staff members of Panthera Africa. The two-hour drive followed the Whale Coast, between the Overberg mountains on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I learned that the low shrub vegetation I could see was called fynbos — one of many names I came across that were both familiar and strange, being an adapted form of Dutch.
We stopped in Hermanus, the town closest to the sanctuary, at a large shopping mall, to buy provisions from the supermarket. Breakfast and lunch were provided by the sanctuary; I needed to buy food for my own evenings. I quickly filled my basket with avocados, tomatoes, virgin olive oil, cheese, and a deliciously fragrant fresh rye bread.
Where are the black people? I wondered. The overwhelming majority of customers were white. The well-dressed, well-manicured women who passed me exuded the confidence that comes with financial and social security. The black population was present too, though in small numbers — as cleaners and cashiers wearing the supermarket uniform.
The memory of Apartheid kept me alert to these contrasts throughout my stay. In the places I visited — Hermanus, Stanford, Gansbaai, Cape Town — the black population seemed to have barely recovered its dignity, or bridged the chasm separating it from the standard of living and self-assured demeanour of the white population. The social landscape reminded me of Australia, the situation of the black population resembling that of the Aboriginal Australians: destitute.
During the drive I learned that work at the sanctuary began every morning at eight with a short gathering of the two founders, Berna, and the volunteers — at that point, five in number. Tasks for the day were distributed and the team moved on to execute them. Most work was done as a whole team, occasionally in pairs, but never alone. All five volunteers had been at the sanctuary for some time and had previous experience with this kind of work.
Breakfast provisions were supplied, but everyone made their own. By eight the table had to be cleared, as the gathering started. Berna, or another staff member, cooked lunch, served around 1 PM.
Berna, who had impressed me immediately with her large strong frame, had been born and raised on a farm near Hermanus. She had two horses and a cat and was obviously an animal lover. It made me smile, being so aware of the difference in our perceptions — all too familiar for her, all too new for me. She mentioned that the previous day a normally spotted leopard named Zorro had died. Why? I asked. Because of an operation that had gone wrong. She said something more about it, but I did not follow the details. I was already asking so many questions that I did not press for more.
Eventually we reached Panthera Africa — a large flat piece of land covered in fynbos, with few trees, and the mountain hills as a backdrop. As I was to discover: bright light and fierce heat during the days, cool nights, magic orange-red-purple sunsets, and an astonishing night sky scattered with thousands of stars.
The two founders, Lizaene — South African — and Cat, originally from Norway, said welcome and goodbye almost in the same breath, as they were heading off for five days’ holiday. Both were in their thirties, attractive and slim, and in a hurry.
We had lunch, to my relief vegetarian. I met the five volunteers, three of whom were soon due to leave. Yet this, at Panthera Africa, was a family too, as I felt sitting with them at the lunch table, trying to memorise their names. I was charmed by the red hair of Lindsay, the young Scottish woman, by her freckles and her laugh, and by the glitters on Dannii’s face — combined with piercings and a heavy sea-green amulet around her neck. Dannii told me later that she had started putting glitters on her face as a small girl and had never given it up, as it made her happy. This was a soul family, I felt. The soul family of animal lovers. I was by far the oldest member, thirty to fifty years older than everyone else, and this did not change until my departure. The lunch was delicious.
Later I went out alone to find my bearings on the farm, as the volunteers often called the sanctuary. I saw wide spaces enclosed by wire. In one of them, far away, I glimpsed a white lion. Opposite it, in a similarly wide enclosure, another white lion was sitting close to the fence, quiet, looking at me. I was so struck by his regal bearing that almost involuntarily I bowed to him, thinking: Your Majesty. He was without doubt magnificent. But still — are there white lions? I wondered. I thought lions were tawny.
I later learned that white lions are indigenous to the Timbavati region of South Africa and are considered divine by the native population.
Somehow, the scene — including white lions where I had expected tawny ones — did not resemble the safari landscapes I had seen in National Geographic. I felt disoriented, and went back to the farmhouse, which I had not let out of my sight.
I slept for many hours, woke up, ate avocado and tomatoes with rye bread, and slept again.
The next morning at half past nine, Dannii — volunteer and staff member, glitters around her eyes and a long blond plait hanging beneath a blue cap with Panthera Africa written on it — took me to the reception to prepare for the tourist tour. The reception was a wooden hut at the sanctuary entrance, decorated with pictures of lions and tigers and stocked with items for sale: T-shirts printed with leopards and lions, caps with Panthera Africa, placemats with giraffes and rhinos. It had a welcoming atmosphere.
Besides Tuesdays, the sanctuary offered daily educational visits at 10 AM and 3 PM, lasting one to one and a half hours, conducted by Berna or Dannii, attended mostly by fifteen to twenty people.
That Monday morning, for whatever reason, only three people showed up: a Swedish couple, well-mannered, well-dressed, good-looking, well-educated — and their eight-month-old baby, who slept soundly in his pram throughout the entire tour.
We moved from one enclosure to the next as Dannii provided information about the inhabitants. The first enclosure belonged to the caracals — fantastic-looking cats with long black ears that seemed lifted from a science-fiction film. I learned that they can run at sixty kilometres per hour, leap three metres high, and catch a bird in flight. Dannii introduced the three caracals one by one: Amy, whose mother had abandoned her. She had nearly died of dehydration and starvation but had grown into a healthy, strong cat. Jack, the most relaxed and affectionate of the three. Max, who during my stay became more aggressive and possibly injured Amy during feeding. Amy had to be taken to the vet to have the wound sutured — one of many unpredictable events that occurred almost daily.
I don’t know why jackals have acquired such a bad reputation among humans. They were so shy that tourists were not taken to their enclosure, so as not to stress them. They looked extraordinarily cute. Despite their shyness, they liked human attention, and one of the volunteers’ tasks — the easiest, most restful — was to spend time near their enclosure, reading or daydreaming. Lucy, Cody, and Maya would emerge from behind the bushes, look for a moment, and run away with a very funny and utterly unmistakable trot.
The jackals’ enclosure, the only one not shown to tourists, was at the farthest end from the sanctuary entrance and nearest to the farmhouse where everyone stayed: the volunteers, Lizaene, Cat, and Joseph — the only black person at the sanctuary. He supported siblings who lived in Cape Town, was always smiling and laughing, and did all the heavy work.
From the caracals we moved with the Swedish couple and the pram to the enclosure of Pardus, or Lalla, as the volunteers affectionately called her — the black leopard.
On the fence was a board with two names: Pardus and Zorro. I remembered that Zorro had died two days before. The operation had been a vasectomy, Dannii told us, tears in her eyes.
A vasectomy?
Dannii explained. Panthera Africa has a policy of no breeding, no public interaction with the animals, and no selling. It is one of seven true sanctuaries among the 179 registered in South Africa. All the others are, in truth, breeding and hunting farms, perpetrating what is known as the canned hunting industry.
Dannii: “In the breeding farms — true breeding factories — the cubs, lion cubs for example, are separated from their mother almost immediately after birth. This causes terrible stress to the mother and the cubs. The cubs are hand-reared by volunteers who pay large amounts of money, believing that the lions will one day be released into the wild. As soon as the cubs can feed themselves, they are rented to other so-called sanctuaries where tourists come to pet and photograph them. This causes further stress; they lose fur and develop diarrhoea. When they are too old to be petted but not yet adults, they are used for tourist walks — again, hundreds of people. When they reach adulthood, they are sold to hunting farms, where so-called hunters pay large sums of money to kill them at close range, in small enclosures, with no risk whatsoever. Adult tigers are mostly sold to China, where they are killed for their bones — one kilogram of tiger bones fetches eighteen thousand US dollars. The lionesses in the breeding farms are forced to produce two to three litters of cubs a year; in the wild, a lioness breeds once every two to three years. None of the animals from these factories can ever be released into the wild — born in captivity, separated from their mothers and hand-reared by humans, they are entirely unfit for it. A true sanctuary does not breed, does not sell, and does not allow visitors to interact with the animals. This is why Zorro had to be vasectomised — and died.”
Dannii’s account crushed me. Broke my heart. In front of the next enclosure, housing two lions — Oliver and Obi — were photographs taken eight months earlier, when they were rescued. They looked emaciated; Obi appeared to be on the verge of death. There were two more photographs: one of the food they had received at the breeding farm — a bone with some rotten meat attached — and one of the water: dirty.
Later I read that many breeding and hunting farm owners are former Apartheid criminals, some of whom received amnesty and some who did not.
Back at the house after the tour, during lunch, I could sense, beneath the small talk and laughter, an underlying layer of confusion and deep sadness caused by Zorro’s death. I looked at his photographs on the wall — a most beautiful white cat with brown rosettes and intelligent, playful, inquisitive eyes. Lizaene and Cat had not gone on holiday after all; they were grieving and had withdrawn for a few days. I had arrived into a community struck by tragedy. I was in shock.
Back in my room I tried to read, with little success. I could not concentrate. I fell asleep again. I woke towards evening, ate avocados, tomatoes, and rye bread, and went back to sleep.
The next morning I woke at five. I was in so much pain from what I had heard that I did not know what to do. I went out with the thought of seeing Neptune, the majestic white lion.
He was sitting close to the fence. I sat down in front of him.
I told him aloud everything I had found out, how much it was paining me — too much to cry. I told him about the breeding and hunting farms, about Zorro deprived first of the right to sire cubs and then, far too young, of his life; about the meat industry, the vivisection laboratories, the mistreated and abandoned pets. I poured out my heart to him.
The lion looked at me, surprised, perhaps, by such an early visit with such a truck of emotions unloaded at his feet. When I stood up, I saw in the enclosure behind me — sitting close to the fence — another white lion. This was Neptune. I understood that in my confusion I had told my story to the white lion I had glimpsed far away on the day of my arrival: Oliver. Not Neptune.
I did not know what to do — tell it all again to Neptune, or leave it as it was and go back to the house? I went back to the house and prepared for the day. My first working day.
From then on, whenever we passed Oliver’s enclosure, he became alert the moment he saw me and followed my every movement. A couple of times, unexpectedly, he ran toward me and stopped just before the electric wire. You’re wearing a colourful shirt, my colleagues suggested. Or: You’re so small — to him you’re a child. Each time I answered half-joking: I don’t know whether to feel flattered or frightened. But I thought he simply found me strange.
There is a great deal of work to be done. The water bowls must be cleaned — all the old water scooped out, the cement floor scraped, and the bowl refilled with fresh water. The enclosures must be cleared of droppings and bones from the previous meal. Everything must be done quickly and precisely, so as not to stress the animals. Every time it was deeply satisfying to do this — to know that the animals had fresh water and clean ground to walk on. The animals had to be fed: at ten o’clock each morning, Joseph, or Adam, or Stig left for neighbouring farms to collect chickens or red meat — everything donated.
Between the cleaning and the feeding, there was always more to do. During my stay the project in progress was the enrichment camp — a large undertaking.
Because none of the animals will ever be released into the wild, their life in captivity must be made interesting by providing new sensory and cognitive stimulation. Almost every day, volunteers created objects from cardboard boxes, pieces of wood, dried and fresh flowers, branches, jute threads, chicken feathers, cardboard egg boxes, and whatever else seemed suitable — placing them in the enclosures to be discovered, sniffed, tasted, and torn apart. Peanut butter, honey, cinnamon, oregano, mint, other herbs, and raw pasta were tucked into parts of the objects. Every week each animal had to receive at least one enrichment object, and the activities were recorded in a notebook: who received what, when — and their reaction to it, to guide future creations.
The enrichment camp took this policy a step further. A new enclosure had been built in the middle of the compound — the enrichment camp itself — with low gates facing all the other enclosures and a tall gate for humans. Through a moveable tunnel, the low gates could be connected to new gates cut into the enclosures of the lions, tigers, and leopard. By rotation, each animal could enter the enrichment camp to climb poles and moveable platforms, scratch tree trunks, play, smell the animals who had been there before, and simply be for a while in a different space from the one they inhabit all the time.
Besides its considerable construction requirements, the new enclosure had to be cleared of iron wire fragments and piles of cement rubble left by the builders, and the wooden sections of the gates had to be treated with tar. For a few days this became the task of Perry — an impressive, brave young woman from Norway in the final phase of her biology studies — and me.
Every day we had to prepare for Obi, the half-tawny half-white lion, and Jubatus, a tawny lion, what we called the herbs: large chunks of red meat cut into smaller pieces, then pockets cut into those pieces, into which we tucked joint supplements and omega-3 capsules. When Obi arrived, he had severe health problems caused by malnutrition at the breeding farm where he had been rescued. Dannii, with her inexhaustible energy and dedication, had raised the funds for his herbs and supplements through her own fundraising organisation, Purrfect World International.
Every day the caracals needed extra enrichment because of their exposure at the breeding project they had come from; the jackals needed human presence; Arabella, one of the tigers, loved to walk — she on one side of the fence, a volunteer on the other. Arabella, of a beauty I never stopped marvelling at, had been separated from her mother at birth, suffered a serious virus that attacked her brain, and survived only through the intensive care of the vet and the people who hand-reared her. Later relocated to a breeding farm, she witnessed the shooting of her brother, with whom she had been inseparable. When she was rescued, her vision was impaired from her early illness, and she had a habit of talking to herself and to the people around her. An animal communicator, asked to find out how Arabella felt and what she needed, discovered that she liked to walk alongside a human. This became, for a while, another of my daily tasks.
Without knowing anything about sanctuaries, I had been fortunate to arrive at a true one — and at one, moreover, where the staff had recently trained in animal communication. The communicator had spoken with each animal individually about their particular needs. This is how the staff came to know that the caracals needed a great deal of play, the jackals needed human presence, and Arabella needed to be walked.
I soon fell in love with Arabella — not during one of our walks, but in a different moment. I was sitting near her enclosure, in front of Lalla’s enclosure, sewing a jute bag filled with seventy-five kilograms of sand — three times Lalla’s body weight, and the weight a leopard can lift and carry in her mouth. The bag was offered to visitors to lift, to give them some sense of the strength of Lalla’s neck muscles. I saw Arabella walking in her enclosure, talking to herself, and the sight pierced my heart. From that moment I loved her deeply. Stig, a Norwegian volunteer who came for only two weeks and worked like a steam machine at the enrichment camp, had fallen in love with Arabella during a previous stay. He had tattooed her name on his left arm.
The work pace was high and the tasks numerous, often unexpected. Yet there were always moments for a brief exchange from the heart, and I came to know some of the volunteers well. They are all remarkable people. Their dedication to the animals’ wellbeing is extraordinary. Their love, like mine, unconditional. I think it is the closest we humans can come to universal love. Guys, I love you all: Cat, Lizaene, Joseph, Berna, Dannii, Adam, Perry, Haimish, Lesley, Stig, Stina, Chris, Anna.
On Tuesdays we bought groceries and had leisure time. Twice we drove to the Kleinrivier, the river running through Stanford — once for a swim at sunset, with the mountain behind us turning golden, and once to kayak. We visited an astonishing Neolithic cave high in a cliff above the Atlantic shore, from where we could look out over the deep blue ocean.
My early-morning lament in front of Oliver had not brought catharsis. I was still deeply shaken by everything I had come to know. If Dannii was riding the crest of the emotions this place could evoke — bliss — I was at the trough of the wave, mourning.
Meanwhile I had fallen in love with Obi, the white-tawny lion. I found him very sweet, and his gentle nature captured my heart.
In the evenings, when all work was finished and I had showered and changed, I would often go to sit with Arabella, Obi, and Neptune. I liked sitting in front of Neptune. My thoughts would become clearer and deeper feelings would surface. His presence had a pacifying effect. Usually, after a while, he would get up and walk away. The audience was over.
I was reminded of an audience I had once with the Dalai Lama, in front of his house in McLeod Ganj. He stood in the middle of the courtyard, and one by one the Tibetans — I was the only white European present — bowed to him and offered him a white silk scarf for blessing. The Dalai Lama gave me his hand, which I shook with some surprise. The moment I entered the courtyard, a deep peace descended on me — the same peace I had experienced before a centuries-old statue of the Buddha in the Lamayuru monastery in Ladakh. The same peace I found now in the presence of Neptune.
Two or three weeks into my stay, I discovered another disturbing and deeply unsettling fact: the red meat the animals received two or three times a week, donated by neighbouring farms, was the flesh of horses shot dead because they had become injured in some way. The day I discovered this, a one-and-a-half-year-old horse had been shot dead because of severe joint problems. He was a racehorse, and I suspected that the damage was the result of extreme training conditions. Racehorses must learn to negotiate some twenty different obstacles; the demands placed on them, under intense pressure, are often unmanageable. Joints are damaged. Lungs can bleed. Stress causes gastric ulcers in many. Or they are injured in competition, which makes them useless to their owners.
This was the red meat our lions, tigers, leopard, caracals, and jackals received.
The owners donated the dead horses because it saved them the labour and cost of burial or disposal.
The wretchedness of it struck me hard. That evening I went to Neptune, deeply troubled, and told him what I had discovered.
Until then I had been mourning the fate of the lions and tigers and leopards in the breeding and hunting factories. Sitting with Neptune that evening, I began to understand his plight — and that of all the other rescued animals: disabled from fending for themselves in the wild, they were condemned to a life of total dependency on human beings. On us, their rescuers. Without us they would die of hunger and thirst. We were their saviours and, for their own sake, their jailors — for life.
Instead of obtaining food through hunting in the wild, they were given the flesh of animals killed by humans because those animals were no longer of use — due to maltreatment, or simply to old age. The wild animals had to be rescued because they had been treated as commodities. They were then fed the flesh of other animals killed because they too had been treated as commodities.
You might think: but the lions, tigers, leopards — they also kill. Innocent deer, zebras, gazelles. They kill; we kill. What is the difference? Why condemn humans?
Here are my answers.
First: we know far too little about the ecological role of predators to extract from it any kind of licence for our own behaviour toward animals. Consider what happened in Yellowstone after wolves — extinct there for a century through deliberate human intervention — were reintroduced. The deer population, which had proliferated and grazed all vegetation away, diminished. Bare valleys became forests of aspen, willow, and cottonwood. Birds returned. Beavers returned — and as ecosystem engineers, they created niches for other species. Otters, muskrats, and ducks appeared; fish, reptiles, and amphibians returned to the rivers. The wolves killed coyotes, so mice and rabbits came back, which meant more hawks, ravens, eagles, weasels, foxes, bears, and badgers. And finally — the rivers themselves changed course. They meandered less, stopped eroding their banks. The physical geography of an immense area was stabilised. Predators serve an ecological function we have barely begun to understand. This cannot be compared to the ecological disasters we inflict.
Second: the animals that predators kill in the wild have led natural lives in freedom before being caught. They have a chance to run. Predators take mainly the weakest. And they kill only when hungry — the numbers remain contained.
Third: before the advent of the modern meat industry, the slaughter of an animal was a ritual performed only occasionally. A goat might be killed once a week, a pig once or twice a year. Meat was a periodic feast. Before being slaughtered, these animals had lived good lives in fields, with space to move, in the company of others, cared for because they were considered valuable. No comparison is possible with the modern meat industry, where animals live lives of torture and are killed en masse in conditions of horror. When we eat that meat, we eat pain, fear, and despair.
The feeding of the big cats at Panthera Africa with the flesh of horses shot dead because they had become useless appeared to me as the quintessence of the wretchedness we humans have brought upon the animal world: we need sanctuaries for wild animals because we have robbed them of their natural lives and treated them as commodities, and we feed them with the bodies of domestic animals whom we have similarly treated. We treat the whole world as something existing solely for our use. We are lost — and in our wreckage we drag all life on Earth along with us, our own included.
I told all this to Neptune, who listened quietly.
Listening to his silence, I understood the following: his attitude was one of helpless nobility in the face of great suffering. About himself, he felt relieved to live in safety and to be treated with respect. Having made his position clear, he stood up and walked away.
I felt deep sadness — and, for a while, something closer to calm.
On the last evening at the sanctuary I went to say goodbye to Arabella and Obi. Then I sat for a long time in front of Neptune, one metre away, separated by the fence. To be in silent communion with a lion is one of the greatest gifts life can give.
After I left Neptune, on the way back to the farmhouse, I met Oliver, sitting not far from the fence, looking at me. I said goodbye to him too — and I heard him say: I had to keep an eye on you. You are unpredictable. He made me laugh. I walked back to the house in good spirits.
The next morning my five weeks at the wildlife sanctuary came to an end, and I left Panthera Africa.
Neptune, Arabella, Obi, Oliver, Jubatus, Achilles, Pardus, Raise, Amy, Jack, Max, Cody, Maya, Lucy — you will always be in my heart. I will never forget you.
River at Stanford where we went to swim
Perry (l) and Dannii (r) New Year Eve 2015
Catherine (Cat, l) and Lizaene (r)
The team, New Year Eve, 2015