Vegans Love Carnivores

This past week has been a concentrated mass of carnage to the highest degree.   We released 17 zebra, 10 wildebeest and 50 impala into the Ngamo site last week and since then the lions have been on an extensive killing spree.   They have already massacred 2 zebras, 2 wildebeest and 4 impalas within the space of 7 days!   This is bearing in mind that they usually make one large kill every 4 days.   These lions have gone from being pretty skinny to FAT in less than a week and it is amazing to see how different they look now – and in fact how much more energetic they are.   I watched Nala and Narnia (aka the queens of brutality) spend all day yesterday trying to hunt down anything that moved within 200m of them.   In fact, between the first and second session, they had managed to take down a pregnant impala that they were busy munching on next to a waterhole by the time we found them.   We only knew it was pregnant because half way through devouring it, N...

Had a very stressful time over the last few days here at ALERT.   Two of Phyre’s cubs are missing, presumed dead, with only one remaining that we cannot locate.   Kenge has probably given birth now too but we have no idea where she is, how many cubs she has, and how many may also have possibly gone the same was as Phyre’s.   Athena, the lioness with the eight month-old, has been seen with three baby cubs (not hers), nursing them, carrying them around and letting Wakanaka her cub play with them.   However, this means that the fragile little things are away from their mother and not being cared for properly, so their survival is very much compromised.   We tried to move Athena and Wakanaka into a management enclosure yesterday to give the new mothers time to sort themselves out, but herding lions is about 100 times harder than herding cats, and this ended up being an epic fail on all accounts.   The lions were stressed, we were stressed; it was not a good day...