Wild Animals Are Thriving on South Africa’s Private Reserves and Game Farms
This is part of Reason‘s 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.
Sitting in the front seat of an open Land Rover being driven furiously backward for about a half-mile while being chased by a bugling, ear-flapping, and very pissed off elephant matriarch is, well, pretty exciting. Our guide later speculated that she had been spooked earlier by a roving pride of lions.
This incident occurred during our stay at the Shibula Safari Lodge in the 140-square-mile, privately owned Welgevonden Game Reserve. The reserve is in the Waterberg District in the northern Limpopo province of South Africa.
Besides being chased by an angry elephant, what happened while my wife Pamela and I visited Shibula? We saw a contest between two cape buffalo as they crashed their heavy horns loudly into one another. We learned that giraffes, tall as they are, are surprisingly hard to spot as they blend into the veldt less than 200 feet away. A troupe of baboons hopped onto the walls of our outdoor shower to observe closely the strange bathing rituals of two naked apes. We watched rhinos sedately grazing, zebras playfully jostling one another, a majestic kudu browsing the bush, and a lioness resting in the shade. For dinner, we enjoyed the sweet flavor of springbok steaks.
One particularly amusing episode occurred when a mother cheetah tried to school her two adolescent cubs on how to hunt warthogs. She sicced them on a small herd of warties and then stood back to watch them hunt. As the cubs darted forward, the herd broke into what can be described only as a mad swirling random scramble. Confused by t
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