Part of the Pride by Kevin Richardson Page B

rainfall in summer. Their babies come into the world either freezing their asses off or nearly drowning in mud and water.
    So, raising our first cubs was difficult. They didn’t take easily to the feeding bottle like lion cubs; they would try to bite through the rubber teat. Sometimes they would not feed for four or five days, which initially worried me. I started researching baby hyenas, reading anything I could get my hands on in books and on the Internet, and I found out that this was normal, as in the wild, hyena mothers often have to leave their cubs in the den for long periods while they go out hunting and foraging. The reason the cubs can last so long without losing condition, I learned, was that their mother’s milk is very high in fat—much more, in fact, than the puppy milk formula that we usually fed to lion cubs. As a result, their diet consisted of a mixture of egg, cream, full-strength milk, and anything else we could think of that was high in fat and protein.
    By this stage I was living with my then girlfriend Mandy and we had some hectic nights looking after Peggy’s cubs, who were like two little devils. Mandy has had to endure all sorts of predator cubs around the house but the hyenas were without doubt the most destructive. I learned the two best places to keep baby animals were the kitchen or bathroom because of the amount of cleaning involved, and because those rooms generally had fewer things that could be chewed. Even so, the hyena cubs savaged my toilet brush and loved jumping up and pulling all the toilet paper off the roll.
    In the wild, cubs fight with each other for dominance. A brother and sister will fight until the female asserts her dominance and same-sex cubs will sometimes fight to the death. We had a boy and girl, and Mandy and I would have to separate them sometimes fortheir own good. I’ve had other cubs who have been so seriously injured by their siblings that we have had to take them to the vet. In the wild, if one is killed outright, or dies of an infected wound, the mother will take it out of the den for the other clan members to eat, or consume it herself.
    Some people might think it’s fun to raise a predator cub, and while it has its moments there are many unpleasant chores that have to be done. Lionesses stimulate bowel movements in their cubs by licking their bottoms. I don’t do that, but I do have to rub them vigorously to make them defecate. The same went for the hyena cubs. When I noticed the hyena cubs weren’t urinating, I had to stimulate their organs. It worked and they started peeing in every direction—all over me.
    Uno was a wild hyena, a stock raider, which meant she had been killing cattle. She was captured by the government nature conservation people. They called the Lion Park and offered her to us, rather than releasing her into the wild, as they knew she would return to the farms and wreak havoc all over again.
    So, this wild animal was dumped on our doorstep and we didn’t know what to do with it. We didn’t even know what sex it was. We put her—as it turned out—in the hyena enclosure’s night pen, a solid room at the end of the compound, so she could recover from being captured. When she came around—I will never forget this—she was crapping all over her legs and cowering and running like crazy right at the brick walls. She had rubbed her head raw against the pen’s walls, to the extent that you could see the white of her skull. She was in a complete frenzy, and I actually thought at one point that it might have been kinder to put her down. She had never known life in captivity and it was clearly freaking her out.
    After thinking about it, we decided that if we were going to keep her we should try introducing her to the clan, so she could be part ofa new social system. I’d seen the ear biting and fighting that went on when we introduced hand-reared hyenas to each other, so I was more than