Part of the Pride by Kevin Richardson

Author:Kevin Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781741985818
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia

Starting at birth, there are two ways to manage captive lion cubs—they can either be left with their mothers or taken away and hand-raised.

Leaving a lioness to raise her cubs, in the presence of the pride males, means visitors can see a whole pride together, which is a nice experience. It also saves money, because hand-raising a cub costs about R6000 ($800) per animal. You can tell the difference when a cub is fed on mother’s milk—it grows faster, it’s more solid, and its fur is in great condition.

Traditionally, though, the problem with leaving a lioness to raise her cubs is that the young ones grow up “wild”—that is, not exposed to humans from a young age. This is because conventional wisdom had it that a human could never go anywhere near a lioness and her cubs. Lionesses were so fiercely protective that they would kill anyone who tried to spend time with their cubs. In the wild, young males are forced to leave the pride once they reach an age of between eighteen and twenty-six months. If they stayed, they would be killed by the dominant pride male. The same thing happens in captivity, but the downside is that if the males have been raised “wild” then humans can never work with them.

Removing cubs at birth means that they could be raised around humans, meaning they might be available for, say, film work later in life. However, a lioness who loses her cubs goes straight back into estrus, so taking them away may mean more cubs to deal with—at more cost—a little more than three months later. Space becomes a factor, as well, because creating more and more lion enclosures is a costly business.

A better model for raising cubs was staring me in the face, but people said it couldn’t be done. What if we could have the best of both worlds—cubs being raised by their mother, but with me allowed to go in with them while they were still small, to habituate them to humans and form relationships with them? I thought that if Tau or Napoleon could mate with Maditau, one of the female cubs who had been born about six months after my boys, and I could get Maditau to accept me around her babies, then we would solve a number of issues. The cubs would grow up healthy and strong; they would get used to me from the start of their lives; the Lion Park would save on hand-raising costs; Maditau would not go into estrus and breed again; and visitors would get to see a whole pride in action.

Further down the track, the male cubs could be separated from the pride once they came of age—and I had already formed a relationship with them—and the female cubs could stay with the pride, on the contraceptive pill, so Tau and Napoleon would be unable to mate with them, as these lions would be their daughters.

In the wild, the problem of fathers mating with daughters is

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