Zoo blessed with new blood
PARKVIEW - Beware your belongings! Joburg Zoo has three new cute, furry carnivorous inmates and they like to play.
Their names are Letaba, Sabi and Jubba, and they like to play with their ball and laze in the shadows. And they may be small, playful furry balls of fluff but their claws are sharp.
Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo is overjoyed with their acquisition of three new lion cubs, spokesperson Noeleen Mattera said.
“It’s a happy day for us,” Joburg Zoo’s carnivore curator Agnes Maluleke said on 27 August.
“We are so excited to have the lion cubs. It has been over five years since the zoo has had cubs and our adult lions are ageing. These cubs will ensure the continuation of the species in our collection.”
The playful triplets are four and a half months old, and they were born on 12 April 2014 on a private farm in Thabazimbi.
They’ve just come out of quarantine and have been given a clean bill of health, and they’ll now offer visitors to the zoo a game reserve experience on their doorstep.
Maluleke, who took care of Wang, Africa’s last polar bear and who was grieving his death two weeks ago, is delighted with this new family.
Siblings Letaba, Sabi and Jubba meanwhile, seem unaware that they’re giving hope to the zoo. They care about playing, finding good spots in the shade to laze in, playfully rubbing up against Maluleke’s legs and making off with notebooks unwary journalists in their enclosure leave lying around.
“Letaba, no! Bad Sabi!” Maluleke says, and after a sulky drain-like gurgle that passes for a cub-roar, the cubs comply and nestle close to her, content.
