Power cuts make catering for predators a challenge

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Power cuts make catering for predators a challenge

Opinion Zone

Cabbages and condoms in 'deadlocked' country writes Zimbabwean author Cathy Buckle
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Days after the much publicised and welcomed signing ceremony of the power sharing deal among Zimbabwe’s major political parties, nothing has changed writes Collen Chibango.
This new government is like a union between a donkey and a horse, it could produce a mule writes Eddie Cross
The media and communication are the key to the change we seek in a new government writes Msekiwa Makwanya from the UK.

22 October 2008

Dear All

On a day when Zimbabwe's future once again hangs in the balance; as the world watches the signing of a power-sharing agreement that may mean a better future for us all, our cherished family of birds and animals insists on business as usual.

As politicians pontificate and journalists scramble for sound bites, the September sun beats down from a sky smudged grey from hundreds of bush fires and somnolent predators raise sleepy heads to note the tractor rolling past laden with meat for their daily dinner.

Eighteen hour power cuts every single day make catering for the predators a constant challenge but every day at 4pm they enjoy a large and varied meal. Dozens of phone calls every day, endless trips of sometimes hundreds of kilometres result in heavily laden trucks returning home with food for the animals - carcasses, stock feed, fruit and vegetables, eggs, sunflower cake and hay.

We scour the mostly empty shelves of the dimly-lit, cavernous supermarkets in the hope that we may find essentials such as soap, washing powder, bread, sugar and salt but apart from a rather worrying surfeit of curry powder and baked beans (which cannot be a happy combination) we usually come out empty-handed and resort to the exhorbitantly expensive but efficient black market.

We are truly grateful to the Friends of Paradise Wildlife Park, Lyn Whitnal and to our friends Sandie and Chalkie Van Schalkwyk who came to our rescue financially at a particularly tumultuous time in Zimbabwe.

We recently received a batch of letters from some school children who had spent a day at the Sanctuary learning about wildlife and conservation. My favourite letter featured a picture of what looked like a giant sausage with teeth, and these words laboriously inscribed below: "I like Kadiki the Lion. She smiles and is fat." I guess that sums up our mission statement in the simplest possible terms....happy, well-fed animals!

Grateful thanks to the Gent family, Rose and Rogan Maclean, Vicky Campion, Catherine Carter, Sophie and Alexandra Bean, Anna Jones and her family, Annabel and Oscar Gritz, Jack Drysdale, Emma Robinson and Phil Barclay, Heather Israel, Rhonnie Marston, Gus and Amanda le Breton, Mrs K. Desai of Westridge School, Steve Curle, Beverley Bridger, Avani Mooljee, Mark and Lyn Houghton, Vera Taylor, Jill Day, Signature Images, the Creeds, Charlene Ross, Cora Ruck, Veronique Wakerly and our constant friends Steve Watt, Mel Phillips and Anne Marie Witkowski for helping to keep our animals well fed, happy and secure.

Clive, Connor and Skye Maclean have been exceptionally generous in their support of the Sanctuary and our projects and we thank them for brightening the lives of our animals at such a difficult time.
Special thanks to Vinay Ramlaul, Joe Leese and Larry Moore for making the service of our hard-working truck possible!

Life in Zimbabwe is stressful and finding myself gazing thoughtfully at the hyena tranquilisers in the vet box was a particularly low moment. Someone suggested yoga as an alternative means to inner peace and I embraced the concept eagerly.

I laid out a mat on the floor, and then went off to change into comfortable clothing as instructed. Harry the caracal, doing his hourly inventory of the house (part of his exhaustive duties as Director of Homeland Security), came upon an unfamiliar object on the floor and took it upon himself to eradicate it as potentially dangerous.

My first yoga session was spent crouched over on the floor picking up miniscule shreds of bamboo matting which Harry then immediately batted out of the dust pan back onto the floor, so we could begin the game all over again. I wonder if screeching expletives and chasing a caracal round the house with a broom could be considered cardio-vascular exercise?

Binge drinking was my next option but a visit to Kennedy's General Dealer/Butchery/Grinding Mill/Petrol Station/Bottle Store down the road from the Sanctuary turned up a packet of dried Mopani worms, a special on casings (cow stomachs) and the queue for the home-brew being ladled out a fertiliser drum in the compound was longer than I had time for. (The grinding mill was broken and there was no petrol either).

So, back to Yoga....
After a few restful stretches, I found myself kneeling on the carpet, arms by my side and forehead resting on the floor, in the "classic pose of the child" as described in my yoga manual, utterly relaxed and tranquil.

As I began to rise with swan-like grace, my head was slammed back onto the floor by the considerable weight of a super predator hurtling through the window and bouncing off my back. Arthur the caracal, returning from a post-prandial stroll round the garden, saw my stooped form upon the floor as a handy launching pad from the windowsill onto his space on the couch.

Two massive black lumps sprouted on my forehead and my lip swelled like a prize fighter's. I gave up smoking a few months ago after Twala, my female caracal, sat on the ashtray and blistered her capacious bottom on a Newbury Extra Mild and anyway, not only are they out of cigarettes at Kennedy's, but matches are short too.

So, back to Yoga....
I thought I might be safer on the verandah this time. Half an hour later I lay supine, supple and serene upon my back, murmuring my mantra and at peace with the world. Suddenly my aura was shattered by the sound of running feet and shouting. The garden gate flew open and in poured the Sanctuary staff, en masse.

I sat up and gazed at them in alarm. Was this an insurrection? An uprising? The long-awaited rebellion brewing since the donkeys ate the wage book and everyone was paid two days late?
"Sorry Madam," murmured the ever-polite Mr Banda, our foreman, "Silas saw you lying on the ground not moving and thought the caracals had killed you."

An overseas television company recently investigated the possibility of featuring the caracals in an Animal Planet programme. They were not chosen to participate. Personally I think they lost the sympathy vote when Harry assaulted an elderly blind donkey on camera, but the caracals seemed to have reached a consensus amongst themselves to rebuff this intrusion upon their lives.

On Take 55 of "Caracals Doing Absolutely Nothing" I could see our chance of fame and fortune slipping away. Harry decided afterwards that even though he was not destined for a life through the lens, he would do the troubled child star thing anyway.

As recreational drug use and crashing a Mercedes are beyond his means, instead he has taken to catching very small chickens, carefully plucking the feathers from their backs and burying them alive in the garden. All chickens have lived to tell the tale and are currently developing an idea for their own reality show.

Harry has had a bad month actually. He was outraged when I shrunk Furfax, his treasured toy lion, in the washing machine. When I presented him with the small, matted object he gazed at it in horror, picked it up in his mouth and walked with measured steps to Kevin the Greyhound's kennel, where he deposited Furfax with pointed precision. Obviously as far as Harry was concerned, Furfax had gone to the dogs.

Our thanks to Mark Walker and his family for so generously supporting Harry each month.

The best stress-reliever of all is the support of our friends; the people who make it possible for our work to continue, who are essential to the wellbeing of our cherished animals and who form the heart of the Bally Vaughan Sanctuary.

Carol Hobbs compiled the BALLY VAUGHAN SANCTUARY RECIPE BOOK which is currently on sale, with ALL proceeds going to the Sanctuary. Our thanks to Sylvia Carter, Dr Vinay Ramlaul, Greg Blignaut, Mark Ruck, David Behr of ZOL and Adriano Gorassini of Yo Africa, and to Les Carr of Copyman for making this project possible.

Diane Twiggs, Carol Hobbs, Leanne Friel, Sharon Nicholls, Kelvin Lindup and Mandy Sim have given up much of their time to promote awareness of the Sanctuary and to fund-raise in order to keep the Sanctuary operational. We would like to thank Golfing and Giving and Wingate Golf Club, the Verandah Gallery organisers, the Greendale Polo Crosse Tournament organisers and the wildlife artist Cora Ruck for giving us the opportunity to create awareness of the Bally Vaughan Sanctuary's work.

Sylvia Carter and Carol Hobbs bake the delicious cakes and biscuits available in our restaurant each weekend and Lesley Ives continues to assist us wherever possible. Our family is not the same, however, without little Luigi, Sylvia's devoted Toy Pom companion, who spent every Sunday with us at the Sanctuary.

The passing of Luigi has left a gap in all our lives and he will always be remembered and missed. Our stockfeed project, a vital part of our Rescue operations, has been a success thanks to the following people: Waylon Lewis and Mike Trask, Golfing and Giving who donated 400kg of high quality horse feed and 50 bales of hay through Wingate Gold Club, the SAVE Foundation of Australia who provide funding for our rescued zebra, Zsa Zsa.

Sadly her little baby, Evo, died - probably as a result of the extreme stress the animals suffered on a neighbouring farm prior to their relocation to the Sanctuary. Clive Maclean has given generously to this project as has Scott Parker. Hamish Cameron, Paul of Shumba Millers, Geoff Hildebrand, Anne Lowe, Sue Roberts, the Cornish family and Preecepoint Trading, Anthea Thackstone, Guy Thornycroft, John Dawson, Meryl Harrison, Linda Chant, Don Mackenzie, Stuart Creal, Grant Evans of MMP have given invaluable assistance. Rob Follet-Smith of Alro Shipping and the Middleton family make it possible for our vehicles to transport the feed.

The Follet-Smith family also continue to provide hugely generous support to our orphaned babies who need hand-rearing and give these little creatures the comforts and care they are in such desperate need of. Thomas Wicke makes it possible for the marmosets to enjoy the high life.

Scary, the matriach marmoset and the closest thing the Sanctuary has to Angelina Jolie (tribes of children and a fabulous pout), will not tolerate a drop in standards which is why you can see me every week in a queue at the Cheeseman deli, clutching packets of dried fruit, nuts, coconut, pots of honey and several litres of yoghurt.

Kylie the Hyena is the star of the Sanctuary. We have installed a bathtub in her enclosure to indulge her love of water and she wallows ecstatically in the scorching midday sun, plunging her entire head under water and frequently surfacing with noxious, water-logged remnants of the previous night's dinner which she then consumes with noisy relish in the bath - the hyena take on relaxing in a bubble bath with a glass of wine.

The highlight of her week is the arrival of her devoted sponsor, Vin Ramlaul, who very bravely ventures into her enclosure to pet and play with her, submitting to being led about with his arm between her bone-crushing jaws and patiently playing Kylie's rather uninspiring slow motion version of 'catch'.

We were very sad when our female Ecclectus parrot died of old age, leaving behind her grief-stricken and much younger mate. Refusing to eat, plucking out his feathers and chewing his feet, he sunk into despair. However, when we moved in his handsome bachelor neighbour, a lonely male Goffin cockatoo, he underwent a dramatic lifestyle change and is frequently seen doing home improvements to the nesting box and colour -co-ordinating the bird seed whilst whistling George Michael tunes. The happy couple are currently thinking of adopting an egg.

We continue to take in injured and orphaned owls and have a high success rate with rehabilitating them and returning them to the wild. Hector, a spotted eagle owl, and Wingstrong, a baby barn owl, spent several happy months with us before heading off into the night sky to start their new lives.

Watching the owls leave is both hugely rewarding and heart-wrenching and it is a wonderful feeling when they frequently return to enjoy the food we lay out for them as a stop-gap for them in case times prove hard for them out on their own. Dr Ramlaul would probably beg to differ after the unpleasant incident involving a very expensive, finely tuned mountain bike and a large quantity of owl faeces in the gear mechanism, but anyway......

In between the day-to-day running of the Sanctuary and our endless hunter-gatherer expeditions for essentials, we have also been co-ordinating a wide-scale rescue of plains game in our area. These animals lost their home after the farm was resettled and the game park claimed for growing vegetables.

Working under extremely difficult conditions this has been a tremendous challenge. The animals are severely traumatised, constantly on the move as they are chased from one area to another by small scale farmers trying to keep them away from their crops, their grazing areas and shelter disappearing rapidly and some of them injured from being stoned, two zebra shot dead for crop-raiding and one eland poisoned which must have been a horrific death.

The fact that the majority of fences have been stolen also makes it very difficult to contain the animals. We are extremely grateful to David Behr of ZOL for a generous donation of fuel for this project, the AWARE Trust and Drs Dutlow and Marabini who are donating their time, Johnny Rodrigues of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force who has facilitated a donation of tranquilisers, Gus and Amanda le Breton for offering sanctuary to some of the animals, Niren Ramlaul and as always, Dr Vinay Ramlaul of the Twenty Four Hour Veterinary Surgery.

WE ARE OPEN EVERY DAY EXCEPT MONDAYS, FROM 9am to 5pm. NO BOOKING NECESSARY.
PREDATOR FEEDING EVERY DAY AT 4pm.
GAZEBO RESTAURANT OPEN EVERY DAY. PLEASE NOTE WE DO NOT ALLOW PICNICKING!
EDUCATIONAL SCHOOL TRIPS, THE BEST KIDS BIRTHDAY PARTIES, AND THE PERFECT DAY OUT ONLY 40km FROM THE CITY CENTRE

*Please note that we are still in need of second hand books for our shop, and are always grateful for ANY kind of food for our animals - dog food, bird seed, any fruit etc - The Twenty Four Hour Veterinary Surgery on the corner of Upper East and Second St Extention (opposite the University) is our Collection Point and anything can be left there safely for us.

*We are desperately in need of chicken mortalities for our small predators as the chicken farm supplying us has shut down. Does anyone know of a chicken farm that can help us? We can collect regularly. *

The story of the Bally Vaughan Sanctuary continues every day. It is a story of a safe haven for animals of all kinds who have nowhere else to go in a country in turmoil, a story of survival and determination and hope, of friendship and faith. It is a story that involves everyone who visits us, who sponsors an animal or makes a donation to the Sanctuary, everyone that reads this newsletter and passes it on to someone else, who tells someone else about our work here. We would not be here without you and for that, on behalf of our beloved animals who cannot speak for themselves, I thank you all from the heart.

With love
Sarah and all at the Bally Vaughan Sanctuary
CONTACT US: sarah@ballyvaughan.co.zw 0912 592 944 or 2 011 601 131 0912 264 160 263 4 497588 263 4 303518/9 011 214 007

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