Hi all.

Here are some good news for those that do not use social media, and especially great news for those that adopt Max. 

We have a new house hippo.  He is the brother of Steve hippo and his name is Max.  He is five years and five months of age and has started, just like Steve did, visiting our home.  Normally he arrives every late afternoon but on the 2nd of August he spent nearly all day with us. 

It was an overcast day with a tiny bit of drizzle and he even slept right near the backyard.  I am over the moon at having another hippo come here and feel secure at Hippo Haven giving us the gift of his presence. Ok he is not Steve and I still hope for Steve to return at some stage, but it is wonderful that his brother has followed Steve’s’ example and now comes to our home. 

Max is relatively calm in that I can sit on the outside step and talk to him and if he gets a scare when someone bangs something or the rangers come in from a patrol, he will move off. I call him and he then returns to the food.  I am offering him as I did Steve: horse cubes as this encourages him to stay around the home where I hope we can keep a watchful eye over him.  His dad Kuchek will, like any bull, try to attack Max.  This is the normal behavior of hippo males towards their young sons. It is to teach them to move away from the family because at a much later stage they will be competition to their father.

As Kuchek’s spends more time upstream with the larger family, Max has a lot more chance of turning our area into a safety zone to live in. He just has to avoid Kuchek when he returns to visit his original females.

So this is fantastic news that Max has chosen our house as a haven, and an honor I do not take lightly.  Max, like so many animals that I have had the pleasure of sharing my life with, knows exactly when I need his company and has come to our home just when I really need his company as of late living in this area has been so extremely upsetting.

The owners of the huge properties that surround us within the Save Valley Conservancy  made a collective decision to cull elephants and have started doing this from late May of this year.  An official statement was put on the web by National Parks and the people who own the lands in the Conservancy, saying they were culling 50 elephants as a management exercise.  This has changed, as all numbers in wildlife always seem to change from what they say they have on the ground to what they say they are going to kill.   In that to date our neighbors have culled over 180 on three of the properties they manage and own and the property in the North that started this idea have culled just under 50. 

I cannot go into detail as to how awful and disgusting the culling is, even if on one property they culled a family in four minutes, and on our neighbors in a horrendous ten minutes! It is in no ways non-invasive for those that are dying, with immense trauma for all who are killed, especially the young calves who are culled last of all, but also to the other remaining live elephants within the north and south of the Conservancy.

Suffice to say that since they started this operation we have been charged by female herds of elephants in our area when we go up to the hippos.  This has happened on two occasions in the last month.  It is totally understandable as to why they would be so aggressive.

The shooters did not cull around us but they did cull up to forty kilometers away. It has been proven by elephant experts who have studied them for over four decades that culling is never the answer to so called over population, and that the detrimental effect it has on all other remaining elephants lives on within them for years, as they never forget and they know when family members are dying on mass.

 I cannot tell you how hard it is to live in a place where such awful things are happening. I would rather face the years of violence we had with the land invasions and our lives threatened than see the pictures in my head of these dying elephants as these hunters shoot them.   They say they will continue culling until at least 600 elephants are gone, so live translocation has to happen soon to save the elephants.

The photos show Max in the last couple of days at home also with two of our six rescue cats checking him out.  Lucky the tuxedo black cat and Teddy the fluffy orange fellow.

I thank Max hippo for knowing and sensing that I need a hippo in my life again at home, so that I can spend hours studying him right at the back door. I thank my husband for taking it on the chin when my anger explodes and I take it out on him, as we are together 24 /7, and I thank all of you for supporting these Turgwe Hippos and any of the wild animals that come into our area.

Love to you all Karen and all the Hippos