Grooms Globe Trek . com – Kids

This afternoon we went to The De Wildt Cheetah Research Center. The tour started with a wild dog puppy. The wild dog puppy, which was a girl, was named Patches. She was three and a half months old and was very playful. We couldn’t touch her because she still wasn’t fully trained and she gave rather hard bites.

We saw a honey badger and two regular badgers. Honey badgers are recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the most fearless animal. They are scared of diddlysquat. But what was really interesting is that all the badgers ate whole, dead baby chicks. Since their teeth are strong, they ate the whole chick: hair, bones, feathers, and all. Our tour guide had stories to even prove the honey badger was fearless. Like, once there was a honey badger that came across a deadly poisonous snake. The honey badger bit the snake with its sharp teeth injuring it, and then the snake bit the badger in the cheek before it dropped dead. Everybody thought the badger had died, but however, a few hours later it woke up and finished what it had started, and it ate the snake like a little victory snack.

After the badgers we got on a safari tour bus. The bus went to a cage with three cheetahs first. The animal feeder, which came on the tour, fed them. They ate with astonishing speed, it was like they were starving and they never got any food. After that, we saw some vultures. Vultures eat carcasses of left over animals. Did you know in Saudi Arabia they are not allowed to bury animals but instead they have to let the vultures come and eat them? Shortly after that we saw some wild dogs. The feeder fed them hole chickens they ate with even more speed than the cheetahs. The chickens were gone within seconds. We also saw a brown hyena. Brown hyenas can digest anything other than plastic, glass, or any kind of metal. Did you know that the hyena is not a male or female until it turns the age of seven and then its body turns into either a male or females body shape?

In the end, we got to get our picture with a tame, beautiful, cheetah! The cheetah’s fur was rather coarse (we know this because we were allowed to touch the cheetah too). This was a remarkable, once in a lifetime experience. We enjoyed it an enormous amount and took a great interest in the animals. This was truly something we will never, ever, forget.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 7th, 2005 at 10:40 am and is filed under South Africa, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.