Keep Our Rescued Animals Healthy & Safe

Dear Friends,

The last months have been really busy for our animal managers and volunteers as we have put in place new enrichments for some animals.

Our mongooses and meerkats play weekly with kongs, balls, or bottles now, this helps them forage for food and keep their natural skills sharp.

For our owls, we hide the food in some grass, so they have to use their senses to smell it and their claws or bill to dig it out.

As we are now in the dry season, not a lot of water is available for our wild animals on the farm. We cleaned the waterhole in front of the camp, and a lot of animals come to drink from it. This helps our students to learn about animal tracks as they go there to identify what the animals left behind.

We also worked a lot on enclosures. The genet and meerkats' homes have been improved for more comfort and a lot of modifications have been made to make it a little bit different so they are not too used to it. Especially for the meerkats, as they dig a lot, we made sure that it did not go too deep as it could collapse on them.

We also finished the new enclosures for the animals that will be arriving shortly. We have created a lion camp with all the necessary safety. We also modified an empty enclosure to welcome a serval, both of them coming from a rehabilitation center in the area. These new camps have been checked by Nature Conservation to ensure the animals well being and safety. We look forward to welcoming them in the coming weeks!

Thank you for your ongoing support!

Stay safe and have a lovely day,

Dear Friends,

Last month has been quite busy for our animal team. First of all, we welcomed the perfect Alexia as an Animal Manager. She is from France and was working as an animal keeper in a zoo.

We have questions for you:

When a buffalo kills a lion and his cub is left as a baby by himself for several days before a human finds him, what should the human do?

- Should we let nature do its job and let this lion cub die? If so, shouldn’t we just kill him, to spare him the suffering?

- Should we just take him and give him an opportunity to live? Even if by doing so, he would have to stay in captivity for the rest of his life? 

So, what would YOUR decision be? And, in YOUR opinion, what does this lion cub hope for?

At DAKTARI, we do not have the heart to kill the lion cubs, not when they are young and cute, not when they are big and dangerous. Nevertheless, we understand and respect people that let nature run its course instead of interfering.

It is why we have decided to make improvements in our camp to welcome 2 lions that were found as cubs, and hand raised. These lions have been confiscated from their owner because they did not have any permits. Both of them, Duma the male and Knotch the female, were born in 2008.

We will make all the efforts necessary to give them a decent life in an enclosure outside of the camp. Also, lions are a symbol in South Africa, so they will become ambassadors for the children who come to our camp in order to teach them how to respect wild lions.

Lions are now marked as Vulnerable by the UICN Red List as their population in Africa decreased by 43% between 1993 and 2014. It is difficult to know all the reasons why but it has mainly to do with the expansion of the habited area. As we have seen in the past, when a lion comes near the local villages, because they can come out of the game reserves or national parks, it attacks the livestock, so people track and kill the lion. Also, the local poachers are motivated by money, because of lions' claws or teeth that are really expensive in South East Asia, to replace the traditional medicine with the claws or teeth of tigers.