Series: Wild Animal Orphans

Every week Comcast has a different broadcaster on "Free This Week," this week it's Magellan TV which I'd never heard of.  One of their offerings is this 2012 series about a Dutch couple who run a wild animal sanctuary in Namibia.  Unlike "private reserves" or private zoos, this couple takes in injured or orphaned animals, nurses them back to health, and then releases them back into the wild.

The animals brought in as babies can be quite tame, and the shots of them interacting with wild cheetahs, lions and baboons are quite startling.  Yet the animals get a lot of time out of their cages to run free, and teach themselves to hunt and forage.  It's quite odd, I think, to see Marlice van Vuuren taking her cheetahs for a walk in the veldt, completely untethered, and Marlice's Jack Russell terrier walking right alongside everyone.  Apparently, family is not prey.

I love shows about wil animals and people who love them.  This show, though a little rough around the edges, is a quite enjoyable saga.  13 half-hour episodes.  Apparently there was no Season Two.

It DOES make you wonder though.

Many tens of thousands of hectares of protected land. A huge modern home. Several outbuildings. Several private-branded Land Rovers. A Cessna airplane. A staff of a couple dozen. Makes me wonder who funded this whole operation... and why. There's no profit in rehabilitating Namibian animal orphans.

Heh. Last night I dreamt I saw a commercial for the Mercy Ships that go around Africa fixing chimpanzees with cleft lips.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Makes me wonder who funded this whole operation... and why. There's no profit in rehabilitating Namibian animal orphans.

Well I'll be darned. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.