For someone like me who is afraid of dogs and crosses the road each time I see one of the larger species approaching, even when on a leash, it was an incredible experience to enter a cage with a litter of lion cubs and later offer my cupped hands full of acacia pieces to a towering giraffe for its breakfast.
These are but two of the unusual experiences I had in South Africa in between World Cup football matches last week, and I must say they were worth the long trip just as much as was watching Brazil play.
We were first taken to the Lion Park, just outside Johannesburg. Here, different packs of lions are allowed to roam free in large separated compounds that provide a natural environment for the animals. It is human beings who are encaged in high trucks and driven through the compound, a few metres away from the dangerous creatures but safely behind bars.
Lions may be known as the Kings of the Jungle but they are lazy animals, and most of them barely looked up when the trucks approached. Others were more adventurous and came sniffing around the vehicles, one of them rising on its hind legs to put its paws and two-inch claws through the wiring.
Lions can sleep up to between 18 and 20 hours a day – why did civil servants come to mind when I heard this? – and are fed only once a week, on Sundays. It takes lions seven days to digest their food.
The park is safe for people as long as orders are obeyed and the animals are not taunted or threatened. But lions protect their territory, and kill to do so. Three years ago, a man jumped over a fence thinking that he could “walk with lions” but he was attacked and brutally killed.
When a lion kills a human being, it is normally shot. This is done because if a lion kills once, it would see any other humans as a threat even though they may not be, and therefore the lion is killed to avoid other incidents. Yet, in this case, since it was the man who provoked the lion by going where he should not have been, the lion was deemed as protecting itself and its pack, and spared. It was like a case of self-defence.
Lion cubs are kept separate from the adults in the park, and it was here that I had the experience of entering an enclosed space with three-month-old lions. If you think they are the size of cats you’re mistaken – even at three months, the cubs are large creatures, the size, I would say, of a fully-grown Alsatian.
We were told not to touch their heads or pull their tails, and to pat them hard as a soft touch would only tickle them and they could react. I didn’t try. By entering the cage, I had already overcome my fears, and I did not want to push my luck any further.
But I did find the courage to feed a giraffe and, I must say, I never imagined that its tongue could be so abrasive. Giraffes and zebras are kept in other parts of the Lion Park; they cannot be described as friends of the lions.
We could experience this even more when, the next day, we went on a safari at the Pilanesberg National Park, a two-hour drive away from Johannesburg. The giraffes and the zebras stick close to each other. They are both herbivores, and their presence in a certain area means that the lions are far away.
One thing I learnt is that although we see zebras as having black and white stripes, the actual colour underneath the surface fur is grey. I couldn’t help thinking of zebras as an expression of life – we often think that life is just black and white, when there is so much grey in between, only we do not see it.
But it was not only giraffes and zebras that we saw during our six-hour safari. We were told that lions were hard to see in the park – which, at 572 square kilometres, is nearly twice the size of Malta – but we did see them feasting on an elephant that had died from old age. The ivory tusks of the animal were removed so as not to encourage poaching, but the dead elephant was left there for other creatures to have breakfast, lunch and dinner for several days. Naturally, until the lions left the area, no other animal dared approach the dead elephant.
Different animals have different lifestyles. If zebras roam in herds and stay close to giraffes – who knows, maybe due to their height giraffes could spot a lion miles away and serve as a warning – other species stay in pairs, such as hippos, or on their own, such as the rhino.
Our guide had the ability to see these animals from a great distance. He would stop the van, point to what would look like a rock, and suddenly this “rock” would move – it was a rhino or a hippo.
Wildebeests – those who became famous in the stampede of the cartoon-film The Lion King – also roam in large herds. The hardest to find, apart from the nocturnal animals who were nowhere to be seen in daylight, were the elephants, which we finally discovered “hiding” in tall grass and vegetation.
Seeing these wild animals in their natural habitat – the only human intervention in this park is the tarmacked roads, yes, of the smooth kind – was an exhilarating experience indeed.