Tall order when it comes to a special pet – The Herald La Femme 17 June 2009
WHEN La Femme ran a report on Shamwari Game Reserve last month, staff at Pumba Private Game Reserve spotted the baby giraffe in the photographs and cried out: “Hey! That’s Melvin!”
And indeed it was, for Melvin was born at the Port Elizabeth Hotel Group’s five-star reserve, not far from Shamwari.
And Pumba director Dale Howarth is a dad with a difference because he was there on April 12 last year when the baby giraffe was born and abandoned.
Its young mother, giving birth for first time, fled shortly after her baby was delivered.
“As he fell, she ran and she never came back. We left it for about three hours and then by 4pm there was a bit of chill in the air,” said Dale, who was faced with an animal dilemma.
The baby giraffe probably would not have lived more than a few hours if it had not been found and Pumba at the time did not have an animal hospital to treat such a case.
“I took the decision to intervene, so I called my friend Johan Joubert from Shamwari and his veterinary nurse popped across and loaded him up and took him to Shamwari.”
Fortunately, although the Eastern Cape’s luxury reserves compete for visitors, their game conservation staff co-operate closely when it comes to helping the animals.
Lacking a mother from which to suckle, Dale’s immediate concern for the baby giraffe was that it would not receive any colostrum, which it should have received through its mother’s milk.
“If they don’t get that, they don’t build up any immunity and he would never have survived. I left Melvin with Johan for three months and then he came back when we built our own hospital boma,” said Dale.
When Dale is at Pumba he feeds the calf two litres of special milk formula.
“They normally suckle for about 14 months and he still has his bottle every morning and every evening. I can call him from anywhere and he will not walk, he will run to me. But he is also so boisterous and naughty because he will run circles around me and chase other people away.
“Our boma is 18 hectares, the size of a small farm and he has full range of his paddock so, as well as his milk, he can graze on the vegetation, like acacia and so on.”
The plan is to rehabilitate Melvin into the wild when he is older – and that means when he is big enough not to fall prey to the reserve’s predators.
“Probably when he gets to about three and a half metres tall, as then the lions won’t hassle him,” says Dale, noting that a large male giraffe can reach 4,5m tall (just for reference,
telephone wires are 4,85m off the ground).
“The fantastic thing is that we have a herd of nine giraffe that come up and visit him every single day so we are hopeful that this will work out,” said Dale.
