Today was a full lion day, usually you don't walk them all day, you do meal prep, make toys, clean the enclosure, look for snares etc, but since we are leaving camping tomorrow they wanted us to really get to know the lions-we started the day with a so called client walk, me and Chris got to walk the P's, Pendo and Phezulu. A client walk means, tourists come looking at the lions and learning about everything we do here, and we volunteers help and talk to them about the lions and what we do, they usually ask us alot of questions. After the first walk we had breakfast and then our second walk, this time it was us newbies who had lion training 2, where we go out and get information, training, practice etc. with the lions out in the bush. You get to learn so much, reading their body language, learning how they work and how we should act with them in certain situations and sit down to study their behaviour and explain why they act in a certain way towards each other, to sounds or just anything they may react to. This time we walked the two older cubs Viti and Fumi! They were very playful and ran around jumpin trees and playing with things. So nice to see! They make us all laugh like crazy, so much love for the lions. When we were on our way back a loud sound spooked Viti and she started running and Fumi with her, every lion is different just like people and Viti is a bit scared of loud sounds, we called in Fumi to the enclosure but Viti was still scared of the whole situation, so we walked away a bit and talked to her, after a while she got confident to come forth to walk inside the enclosure. You could really see at this time how much love these guys have for the lions, and when something like this happen, they don't hit them or scream for them to come back, they are using positive reinforcement and are so patient and calm, love to see that relationship to wild animals, all that matters is the good relationship to the lions and this is so beautiful to see. We then went back for lunch and a little break where we helped out with the bunny masks for kids at the Easter party on Friday, will tell you more about this later ;) We then went back to Masuwe, on our way we saw little baby Pumbas, sooo cute!!! We had a research walk with the P's, where we have a board and write exactly what theyre doing each 2 min for an hour. We had a nice talk with the lion trainers and lots and lots of laughs, they are so funny and weird, don't ever trust them cause they joke all the time ;) We went back for dinner and on our way we acually saw a herd of WILD ELEPHANTS, they drove the car closer so we were maybe 50m away from them and they just stared at us and we were trying to be completely quiet (even though we wanted to scream and laugh) and it was just mind blowing!! Back at the house we played some games! Tomorrow we will go camping, excited for that and going to bed early :)
Viti and Fumi
Låter som att du har de helt fantastiskt! Så stolt över att du gjort detta möjligt för dig själv! Miss U! <3