Pretty Kitties

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Today was my first day at work at the Cango Wildlife Ranch. It turned out to be more of an orientation so we could take a look around and find out what this center is all about and what difference we could make.

Got up at 6:45, ate cornflakes and bananas for breakfast, and left the backpacker's by 7:30am. Thewalk to the ranch (which took about 20 min) started out a little chilly. However, a quarter of the way through, we started hitting warm pockets of air. It's the sensation that you sometimes get when you are swimming in an ocean and there are occasional warm water currents, or when your standing next to someone peeing in a pool. 😉 By the end of the walk, it was already pretty warm and I had to take off my fleece and my long sleeve shirt.

Arrived at ten til 8 and saw all the ranch employees gathering for their early morning meeting before they all split and went their separate ways. Introduced to Odette, the general manager, Garth, the volunteer coordinator, and Chris, head of cheetah breeding.

The Cango Wildlife Ranch is supported by the Cheetah Conservation Foundation (ccf). There are two halves to the Ranch: the commercial side is the part that is open to visitors where people pay to view and also interact with some of the endangered species, and the conservation side, where these endangered species are bred to improve their strength in numbers. Today, we were able to experience both.

After a short introduction to some of the key people at the Wildlife Center, Chris said that he would take us to see the cheetah breeding center. We hopped on the back of his truck and he drove us away from the ranch and into the mountains where the cheetahs were kept. This area is not open to the public so I felt really special to have been able to see it. There were two sites where the cheetahs were kept with maybe about 16 cheetahs in each. At, the first site, each cheetah had its own enclosure whose entrance faced in towards a common area called Lover's Lane. There were two main males used for breeding. Every couple of days, the breeders will let one of the males out into Lover's Lane. The male cheetah paces back and forth past each female's enclosure and marks the ones that he is interested in. Then the breeder will let the male cheetah into the enclosure of one of the females' enclosure that he was interested in and the two mate immediately. The male stays in the enclosure with the female for three days before it is put back into its own enclosure. The breeders observe the female behavior afterwards. If she stops eating at meal times, it means she got pregnant. If not, they try again another day.

Some of the cheetahs that we passed were hand reared and loved human contact so we were able to pet and scratch them through the fence. They constantly rubbed themselves on the fence and purred just like little kittens except a LOT louder. Others were rescued from the wild and hissed and spit at us as we walked by, so we let them be.

After our visit to the breeding center, we went back to the ranch and took one of the tours that's open to all the tourists. It was nice to see what the tourists had access to and compare that to the behind the scenes access that we had.

Then we met Francois, one of the animal trainers. He was a cool guy. When we talked to him, we got the sense that he was sort of a badass, but then when he was near the big cats, his voice would suddenly change into baby babble because the cats were his babies. He hand reared a lot of them from when they were just born. He took us to some private enclosures where his white bengal tigers were. There were two white bengal cubs that were at the ranch to be observed by the public, but these were private areas where the two older tigers lived and bred. It was amazing to see the tigers so up close and personal. They were so beautiful with their white fur and blue eyes. They also rubbed up against the fence asking to be scratched, but we didnt' dare. One playful nibble from those guys would mean one less finger for us. Francois could however, because over the years, the animals and their trainers develop a strong bond with each other although the trainers can never fully trust the animals. After all, they are wild and never fully lose that wild instinct.

In the afternoon after lunch time, we met with Chris again at the slaughter house (referred to as the blad). It was feeding time for the cheetahs that we visited in the morning at the breeding center. We hopped into the same truck that we rode in the morning. However, this time, there were 4 dead calves in the back with us as well as large bowls of minced meat. Three of the calves were lunch for the enclosure full of wild dogs and one was for the enclosure of 4 cheetah cubs. The minced meat was prepared for the adult cheetahs. Lunch time was pretty gruesome and it made me glad that we had eaten ground beef yesterday and that we weren't planning on having it for a meal anytime soon.

We ended the day by going into the cages of two of the cheetahs and the two white bengal tiger cubs, petting and taking pictures with them. Tourists are allowed to pay to experience these "natural encounters" and so the cheetahs Caine and Duma and the Tiger cub, Chewbacca and were very tame and used to human contact.

We headed home around 4 exhilarated from our full day of interacting with all the big cats.

I did some laundry, and Amy cooked pizzas for us all.

I'm about to pass out now, but I'll be ready tomorrow for a full day of work.

Check this site out to meet the animals that I'll be working with
http://www.cango.co.za/ouranimals.htm

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Comments

[James YH Chen]

Wonderful Trip
Hi, Angela, It’s nice to look through your journal on adventurous eco-tour in South Africa. You are lucky to live near all the animals during the trip elephants, cheetahs, tigers, lions, emus, lemur, meerkats,otter, hippos, flamingos, wallabies etc. etc. Wow , I tell you Angela, to look through the journal I had to google through the dictionary for most of the name of animals. The trip is for sure a wonderful and unforgettable experience for you. Take care and enjoy the rest of trip. A-Gong with love