Mufasa Lion
Mufasa Lion
Male Lion
Born 1995 - Died 1998
Mufasa and his sister Safabi arrived in 1995 as tiny, two week old cubs. The people who bred them claimed to be running a sanctuary but were selling Sarabi and Mufasa at an exotic animal auction for $150.00. They were so strung out on drugs that they were trying force feed them curdled milk and they were resisting mightily. It was never our intention to rescue big cats, but my former husband couldn’t leave her in the hands of such incompetence and brought them home to me. We would learn later that you can’t buy a cat out of even the worst situation because it just continues to fuel the breeding and selling, but in 1995 we didn’t see the big picture.
We had a house full of rescued bobcats and lynx who had come from the last fur farm rescue we did in 1995. More than 20 youngsters had the run of the house. Lions being the pride animals they are were more than happy to be adopted by these older, yet smaller fur balls. The bobcats would all pile up on the bed into a purring heap of fur and the smaller ones had to be pulled out of the stack periodically for fear of them being crushed by the weight. The little lions were too small to jump up onto the bed and would pace, frantically screaming, for me to lift them up into the pile with the others. They were more than happy to be on the bottom of the stack and would dive right in. I don’t think I will ever forget what it felt like to see Sarabi and Mufasa so happy in their makeshift family pride of bobcats and lynx.
Once one bobcat was awake, the whole group would spring to life and go racing through the halls and out into the fenced yard via a pet door. The little lions would again be screaming to be put down on the floor to join them and every where the bobcats went the toddling lions were right behind them. The lions were floor bound where the bobcats were leaping off door jambs, furniture and window sills. Sometimes I would see Mufasa and Sarabi pause by the mirrored closet doors to talk with their reflections. When the bobcats were just too aloof, the reflections always wanted to talk with them.
Weaning the bobcats from the bottle to meat was a pretty quick process that ended up with a couple of days of feeding a warm mush of meat and milk from my hand to their lips. Once they got the idea they would lap it up from a plate and within a week the milk was no longer needed. Lions, on the other hand, were a much messier process. It became such an ordeal that I would put on a swimsuit and sit in the bath tub with them. By the end of each meal we all had to shower off in the tub. Doing that four times a day got old in a hurry for me, but the cubs just loved it.
In time the lions weighed more than I did and sleeping on the bed with the bobcats was not a viable option for the bobcats. I remember the first cage that we built for them. All of the reference books said that lions don’t like the water, so we build a cage that was an acre in size and consisted of three sides and the lake as the fourth side. Sarabi and Mufasa were too big to move in carriers and back then we didn’t have the transport wagons so we decided to walk them on leashes from their backyard area to their new cage. They wouldn’t go anywhere without each other, so one person had to walk both of them or they would get so freaked out at the prospect of being separated that they would only hang onto each other. I had both of them leashed and as soon as the gate was open it was like skiing behind a twin engine boat.
As we bolted across 20 acres and into the new enclosure, I released the collars and watched them both go flying across the cage… and into the lake. Dang! I guess all of that weaning in the bath tub had imprinted on them that water is great fun and the books just didn’t apply to them. Perplexed we had to round them up before they hit the other side of the lake and the only things available were a Jon boat and a canoe. Floating bathtubs looked like even more fun. The rowdy pair began trying to climb up into the boats and it was all we could do to keep them upright while herding the cats back into their enclosure. By this time you can imagine how tired I was, but had to leash them back up and ski back to their backyard home, until we could build a fourth wall on their new enclosure.
Mufasa’s Sister Sarabi
You hear a lot of backyard breeders saying that they are breeding Barbary Lions to save them from extinction, but it isn’t true. Many years ago, when the King of Morocco first came up with the idea of bringing the Barbary Lion (AKA Black Maned Lion or Asiatic Lion) back from the edge of extinction, he sent a group called Wildlink to the U.S. to look at 327 captive lions who were reported to have traits of the Barbary Lion.
Of the 327 likely candidates only three were considered pure enough representatives of the species to use for a captive breeding program. There were two males chosen and Sarabi (Mufasa’s sister), our lioness was the only female selected. She is a representative of 14 of the 17 Barbary traits, making her the closest living relative to the cat that is now extinct in the wild. Before the program ever got off the ground the King fell sick and his family had no interest in saving the cats who once were used by the Romans for entertainment in the coliseum.
We don’t believe in breeding cats for lives in cages so we never bred Sarabi, but because she may someday be called upon for her genes, we did not spay her. She would cycle in and out of heat and did so for many years.
Back in the 90's when I lived in the old gift shop (where everyone eats as of late) my bedroom door (where the stairs to the new gift shop are) had a cat door to a cat yard and on the other side of that yard was the cub house. It was an old mobile home that was very small and we converted it into one long room with a bank of cages, like you would see in a vet's office down one side and chairs on the other side. At one end was a huge sink for washing the kittens and an area to blow dry them. It was for the purpose of efficiently feeding, cleaning and housing the kittens from the fur farm rescues (56 in 1993, 28 in 1994 and 22 in 1995) It took several people to feed all the kittens, and wash and blow dry them, and the first ones to finish eating got to play on the floor when they were done, until we worked our way through all of them.
The cub house had a pet door to the yard too, so everyone got to run around out in the sun, or they could go over into my bedroom. They would all pile up on the bed, but Sarabi and Mufasa, the lion cubs couldn't climb or jump like the others and they would wail until someone put them up on my bed so they could sleep in the lynx cuddle puddle. If you can imagine, 20-40 cats, all sleeping on the bed, I'd often rotate them just to be sure no one was being crushed underneath.
Just about the time we'd finish, we had to start over because they had to be fed every 4 hours at first, then 6, then 8 until they were on solids. Even solids were an absolute mess, so baths continued. Auroara Tiger loved the blow drying so much that I used to let her ride in the front seat of the car with the windows down to entertain her, even into adulthood. (I’m embarassed to admit)
There was a sweet woman named Katie French who we paid to come in and do the midnight and 4am feedings from time to time, so Jamie and I could sleep through the night every once in a while. There were only about a dozen kittens from the Canadian fur farm in 1996, so I hardly slept from 1993-1996.
We would listen to CDs of Enya while feeding because it was so relaxing to them. When my maternal grandfather was dying from Parkinson's Disease, I loaned him my Enya CDs and he said it seemed to him like an angel singing. This is how Enya Cougar got her name.
1998
One day our three year old Mufasa was found “down”, meaning in this case, nearly unresponsive, in his cage. I checked to be sure he wasn’t choking because his breathing sounded awful. No one had a big enough X-ray machine for a 200 lb + lion so our vet arranged for the Gainesville University clinic to see him. That meant transporting him 2.5 hours before we had big transport cages, or enclosed vehicles. With the help of volunteers we managed to get him into a makeshift wire crate in the back of my Dodge Ram pickup truck but he was terrified of the wind, so before hitting the highway I tossed the keys to the volunteer with me and I climbed into the cage with him so I could hold him all the way to Gainesville.
When we arrived, I had to sign documents giving the clinic full control of the situation or they wouldn’t treat him. Mufasa died after the Gainesville University large animal clinic kept him sedated for more than 5 hours in order to allow all of the students to see and touch a real lion. I was not allowed to stop it, and not even allowed back to where he was being exploited this way once I found out from a student who was leaving that day. I vowed we would have our own on site hospital and equipment one day so this would never happen again. They said his cause of death was pneumonia even though he hadn’t been sick before the day he was found struggling to stand. - Carole Baskin
Memorials at https://bigcatrescue.org/category/memorials/
