Hippos

"Yes, Glenn Feldhake. He shows hippos as others have shown elephants and lions – with love. What many people in Africa believe is that the hippo is the most dangerous of all wild animals. People overseas are attracted to hippos on an emotional level due to their somewhat large frames – this is quite fashionable as many people have somewhat large frames these days, so they can identify and sympathise with the hippo. Yet a hippo is totally light on its feet. A human being can be quite large and yet have the lightest feet on the dance floor – well it’s the same for hippos. See a hippo bouncing along under the water as it moves along the bottom of a pool and one does not see an overlarge animal. Instead the hippo appears to glide and dance and look like a Walt Disney hippo ballerina. So their largeness is an attraction. Initially, I was the first woman in Zimbabwe to take and pass the National Parks hunting exam. Not to hunt but to be a professional guide. I did not have to do what all women have to do now and that is to kill an elephant or a buffalo to prove their ability at protecting a client. I just had to work for a couple of years under professional sport hunters. But safari work was not enough for me as it dealt with the tourists more than with the animal. After meeting George [Adamson] and when having to make the decision to join him, I met my husband and my life changed. We ended up here and the hippos were on our doorstep. Our bush camp was above their home, the Turgwe river. I made a census of the Turgwe hippos and found that their numbers had declined dramatically, mainly due to their habitat shrinking, dams, crop-planting that erodes the riverbanks so that the rivers filled with sand, etc. Then, in 1991, the drought hit, the worst in living memory. I was in a position, for the first time in my life, to do something positive. I approached the owners (then animals were owned by whoever’s land they were on). I suggested that I found out how to feed hippos in the wild, and that I would find the food, feed the last hippos in the river and, hopefully, save their lives. I did. I raised about 26,000 British pounds and with that money fed the last Turgwe hippos for ten months. My husband and I built a cemented pan (a kind of hippo swimming pool), basically 21 feet wide, six feet deep and 45 feet long, with walls to contain the pumped borehole water on both sides of the pan. I built a drinking trough and we had piping put underground to the nearest deep borehole which was over 18km away. The Turgwe river had totally dried up. At the end of this period the only hippos left alive in the Turgwe were the ones I fed. One female even conceived during the feeding program. This calf, Tembia, is now a young bull who has his own family some 5km upstream from my main hippo study group. Tembia is alive thanks to the help I received from countless strangers around the world. Some of those people are still with us today as adoptive hippo parents. I formed the Turgwe Hippo Trust in 1994 in order to continue to protect and conserve these amazing animals. Yes, they can kill people. Here in Africa they live in waterways, natural or man-made. They are wonderful ambassadors to those waterways, as they create food for the fish, they improve the grasses, they cut down on bushfires by how they graze and so on. One mistake most people make with them and with all of Africa’s great mammals is that they see them as large and slow. All of them are large but they are all faster than us, so people can get hurt if they play with them. Africans living with them often accept their presence for the reasons above, but those that are not used to them (like some of the people who invaded these lands) throw rocks at them or try and snare them. If you keep chucking a rock at a potentially dangerous animal then you quite rightly may get charged and hurt. If you disrespect any animal, even a dog or a cat, you can get hurt. It is a question, more than anything, of respect. I have one hippo, Blackface, who dislikes man and is totally unpredictable, or, should I say, she is predictable – she will charge out of the water and go for you. Over the years of studying her I have learnt that she is the best mother of all the Turgwe hippos – she now has her first male calf since 1990. His name is Five – he was the fifth calf born in 2004 and will be five on 30 December this year – and Blackface at this moment has more cuts on her body than any other female hippo. One young male, Kuchek, who will turn nine next March, doesn’t want Five in the group and Blackface is taking the brunt of it all. She is magnificent. I believe Five may be her last calf as she is not a young hippo. She was the favourite female of my Bob, the dominant bull. It started off initially as just the story of the hippos and how I fed them in the drought and how it all was totally successful and how then the Turgwe Hippo Trust was born. I was then told by various people to upgrade it to my own story: how an English girl followed her dream, the trials and the tribulations that brought me here, the experiences I went through to get to where I am now, how our lives, mine and my husband’s, have been threatened by rifles, bows and arrows, mobs, how we have stuck it out and, most importantly, how much my love for these hippos and those amazing people (the faceless strangers out there who have contributed via www.savethehippos.com ) have kept me going through all of the shit that Zimbabwe has had in the last nine years. That is what my book is about. My agent, Euan Thorneycroft of A M Heath in London, UK, believes in my book and is looking for a publisher."