Being a dog person all my life, the idea of owning a kitten, let alone a lion or a tiger, sounded damn near insane.

But for this heartbroken family in Limpopo, who lost three of their lions and their Bengal tiger to death by poisoning, my dog-loving heart can’t help but go out to them.

The Fernandes family who owns the Jugomaro Predator Park woke up in the early hours of May 25 to find four of their beloved big cats had been poisoned on their farm near Vaalwater.

News24 reports:

Justin Fernandes and his mother Rosa were alerted to trouble when their wolf Bolt started barking.

The first cat they checked on was Panjo, the Bengal tiger that made headlines in 2010 when it escaped and was found two days later in a pine forest on the Swartkoppies farm in the Verena area, near Bronkhorstspruit.

Justin said all the other cats were okay but he noticed his white male lion, Elvis, chewing on the gate of the enclosure.

“I thought his tooth was stuck and that he couldn’t get out,” he said.

Then Elvis’ condition began to decline for the worst. Despite Justin’s attempt to perform CPR, the big cat was gone.

Even worse – Kai, a tiger cub that shared the same enclosure with Elvis, was found “stiff as a board. He digested most of the poison in his system”.

The Fernandes’ other two brown lions, twins Taariq and Hercules, were found throwing up. By the time a vet arrived from Bela-Bela, the brothers had died.

The pelt of a freshly-slaughtered rabbit was found in bushes near the enclosures. The rabbit had been cut up and laced with the poison Temik, also known as Aldicarb or “Two Step”.

Were it not for Bolt raising the alarm, the Fernandes family might have found their cats later, albeit “chopped up into pieces”, said Justin.

Absolutely grisly to imagine.

Of course, the Fernandes family are absolutely devastated at the loss of the cats, all of whom were moved from Krugersdorp, Gauteng, to their farm two weeks before their deaths.

Justin tearfully explained:

It is like you are losing your children. My whole life has been around these cats for the past nine years. I can’t really say how angry and frustrated I am and that I could not do what I needed to save them.

His daughter Maxine, who works abroad and arrived at the park on May 24 to surprise her mother, is disconcerted by the thought that the perpetrators might have been watching them:

It is a very scary thought to think that intruders, poachers would enter private property and sit and watch. We watched our animals suffer.

We were with Taariq and Hercules when they passed and we were holding them – telling them that we loved them and sorry that we failed them.

It was very, very hard to watch my boys take their last breath. It’s alright now. What is done is done. It has hurt us extremely deeply, but we will do everything in our power to keep the remaining cats at Jugomaro as safe as possible.

Spare a thought for the Fernandes family, folks – big cats in danger depend on people like them.

[source:news24]