Ksenya Islamova, the founder of the Nursery of Exotic
Animals, pets Simba in his enclosure in the industrial area near Kyiv on
Aug.20.
Ksenya Islamova and her partner Mykola Barvynsky
from the Nursery of Exotic Animals (NEA) walk the street in an
industrial area on the outskirts of Kyiv carrying plastic bags with the
raw meat.
“We are going to feed our kitty. He must be missing us,” says Islamova. The one she calls a “kitty” is actually an 11-month-old lion cub called Simba.
Ukrainian
soldiers found Simba in the country’s war-torn eastern region Donbas
when he was three months old. The cub was wandering the streets near
Luhansk alone. The servicemen rescued the cub and started looking for a shelter or a zoo to take him. Islamova was not the first one to be called and offered to take Simba in. Other zoos refused to give shelter to the lion. “People
said that he will grow so fast and eat so much that I won’t be able to
support him,” recalls Islamova. “But when we saw him – so tiny, so thin,
with his nose scratched - we decided to take the risk.”
Today the almost grown-up Simba weighs almost 85 kilos, but he still welcomes his owners purring and meowing like a cat. The
refugee lion got a nice roomy enclosure with a shed to hide from the
rain and heat in the industrial zone near Kyiv. Islamova and Barvynsky
had to rehouse Simba here after he leaped over the fence at the NEA
shelter and tried to escape. “Thank
God, we caught him before he managed to get to the nearby village,”
Islamova says, looking at Barvynsky feeding Simba slabs of veal.
Now
Simba eats four kilos of raw meat a day, but in winter his daily ration
will be six kilos. For Islamova and Barvynsky, who used to work only
with the smaller cats and lizards, it’s getting harder and harder to
support the lion.
Islamova
has been trying to find Simba a better home in Ukraine’s zoos. But that
is not easy at all, according to Ihor Dovgy, the head of the Predator
Department of the Kyiv Zoo. “She
(Islamova) offered us to adopt Simba. But we have no place for him,” he
says. “Our pride won’t take him in and could even hurt him. Simba needs
a spare place to make his own pride with the lionesses of his own age.”
After
the Simba’s story went online, the cub got a chance for a new home.
Islamova got many offers from Ukrainian zoo shelters, eco parks and
private zoos. But the only place she wants Simba to live is Jugomaro Predator Park in South Africa.
Justin Fernandez, the owner of the park, said he would shelter the Ukrainian lion. “I
found out about the lion from a client that has been to my park and
told me the sad story about Simba,” Fernandez told Kyiv Post. “I have a
big passion for big cats and when I heard his story I thought to myself
how can I help and save this beautiful cat. So I’ve been making a lot of
phone calls to see who can help me get him to South Africa.”
Unfortunately,
transporting a lion from Kyiv to South Africa is very expensive.
Islamova is looking into possibilities to find money and send Simba to
the new home. Another
obstacle, according to the Kyiv Zoo’s Dovgy, is that Africa doesn’t take
animals from around the globe now due to the Ebola and animal aphtha
epidemic.
No comments:
Post a Comment