Tuesday, 21:34, 14 June, 2011

This morning I got up at 6:30 due to some obnoxious black birds that were making a WRAWWWWW sound outside. After I opened the shades to see if it was daytime, the African morning sun poured in, and then I saw those flat umbrella acacias outside my window and couldn’t stay in bed any longer due to excitement. I supposed I might as well get used to getting up early anyhow.

After a breakfast including a very tasty sorghum porridge, we went to the Ridgeback Dog Kennel where Stephanie’s dog Trout was trained. She thought that since we were still going to be at KWS for another day, we might be interested in seeing where the guard dogs are trained, since their training has so much to do with animal behavior. Oliver insisted that Aurelia and I ride in his car; he has grown attached since we stayed at his house. :-) One of his nannies named Virginia came with us. She doesn’t speak English!!!! I was so happy; not only could I practice my Swahili, but it was necessary for me to communicate with someone. When we arrived on the huge ranch-type property, we were greeted at the gate by a Kenyan with a German Shepherd who sniffed us for drugs and bombs as part of his training. Then we drove past a little city of doghouses with German Shepherds and the kind of dog Trout is (I can’t currently remember the name), and at the end of a driveway Stephanie’s friend Jeff Green (who heads up the place) invited us to tea on the porch of his huge straw-roofed tent. I sat down at the table and had some tea, but I noticed that there wasn’t a chair for Virginia and that no one offered her one. A native Kenyan was also busying herself preparing our tea; no one attempted to start up a conversation with her. I was fed up with this pre-Civil War Era type behavior (even though I know that no one necessarily means it to be that way), and I took my mug of tea and went to talk with Virginia and Olly in some chairs off to the side. Oliver is amazing with his Swahili. Stephanie is raising him to be bilingual, which I think is awesome. He understood every word Virginia spoke to him. Virginia was delighted to see that I knew Swahili enough to hold a conversation. We talked about her family; both of her parents are dead, and she has a brother who lives on the west side of Kenya and a sister. She also had another sister who has died, if I interpreted right, and she has four children and no husband. She didn’t elaborate on them past their names, which I can’t remember. She loves dogs, and she loves Stephanie’s children, so I assume she enjoys her job. Overall she seems a very interesting lady. I told her about how I love the mountains here because we haven’t got any mountains back home, and she told me about Mount Kenya and how she has seen it but not climbed it. I found another friend in her, and I was very impressed with how well she tended to young Oliver. He responded exceptionally well to her.

Watching the dogs practice was astonishing. They are trained to read intent, which I find wicked interesting from a behavioral perspective. If they read that someone is intending to harm their owner, then they will attack that person; as soon as the person’s malicious intent relaxes, they back off. Jeff said that one day he was being a real pinhead for whatever reason, and he was yelling at his staff (which is comprised of boys that have passed a really competitive program of physical training and dog handling), and he actually got bit three times by dogs that thought he was going to harm their trainer. However, these dogs back off at one word from their trainer, and can then be pet by children. It’s amazing (I feel like I need a thesaurus for the words “amazing” and “awesome”). The dogs are trained on obstacle courses and fed a diet strictly of meat. The obstacle courses had some straight up and down ladders for the dogs to climb, and walls probably 12 ft high that they jump over. The dogs are trained in German, a language different from that of the country in which they are being employed, so that an attacker would not know to yell the command “foo-yet” to make them stop (Mom, you should tell Kathy Babcock about this, because I think she has a retired working dog like these ones). The dogs are used to protect people who purchase them, but they are also used to track rapists and to sniff out stolen objects, cocaine, etc. Adrianna, Aurelia, and I climbed up onto one of the ladder-structures that had a flat top; the view was incredible, as it was probably 25 ft tall. I sat next to a really sweet Kenyan guy who had worked at the place for five years, and the one-year old he was training named Wolf. I fell in love with Wolf. Such a sweet dog! The guy (whose name I could not understand) explained everything that was going on as we watched a demonstration. One of the workers came out in a bite suit made of Kevlar, and was told to think thoughts about harming Stephanie or the other trainers. Then the dogs would be let off their leashes and just nail the man in the bite suit. However, as soon as their trainer yelled at them to stop, they would completely back off, allowing their owner to shake the person in the bite suit’s hand. I guess that the dog bites are so strong that the people in the suit often do not come out unscathed even beneath that Kevlar. We also watched one dog attack two men in bite suits at once, alternating depending on which one was currently nearest their owner. Little adorable Trout knocked down two men.

I was reluctant to leave Wolf, but made myself descend the structure when the other girls did. Jeff explained that he also heads self-defense programs and martial arts schools. Overall, it was a really neat experience. I asked Jeff if he had any problem with leopards, since I am told they really have a taste for dogs. He said they haven’t had any problems leaving the dogs out because leopards cannot get over the surrounding fence.

Driving out, Stephanie was telling us that Duke University has a really good program for inter-species communication, something I am terribly interested in (e.g. the dogs’ ability to read intent). It’s a shame that I harbor such adverse feelings towards their basketball coach. I just don’t know if I could go to a school without respecting their basketball team.

When we got back to KWS, we went swimming in the freezing cold pool until lunchtime. I am not exactly living like Jane Goodall just yet in case you hadn’t already picked that up; that starts tomorrow (SO EXCITED!!!). While we were swimming, Maribou Storks were flocking in the distance (although I didn’t see any babies in cloths dangling from their beaks). If I knew more about bird behavior, I could estimate what they were doing; perhaps storks eat carrion. I found a small RHINOCEROS BEETLE in the pool! It was SO COOL. At home I pick out our native beetles, flies, spiders, etc. from our pool; here I pick out RHINOCEROS BEETLES.

I think there need to be more girls at this school. Thank goodness our phones don’t work over here, so I had a legitimate excuse not to give my number to the Kenyan guy who asked me for it post-swimming, after forwardly stating that Kenyans make better husbands than Americans after about 5 minutes of conversation. Poor Janie had a more persistent guy, and had to have a long discussion with him as to why she couldn’t date him. I much prefer the guys we have met who are not so silly; however, the bold ones are not representative of the average guy here, and I think that their fascination is merely a product of our being foreigners. At any rate, I’m glad we are departing tomorrow.

After lunch Stephanie, Kay, and Dave gave some more lectures on carnivore conservation. The best part of the lecture was that there is a solution that has been found to work for lions: involving the local community. A group of Maasai was designated as the “Lion Guardians” three years ago. They were taught to read and write to a functioning level (as most were illiterate), and were then taught how to monitor lions. Three years after the start of the project, not A SINGLE LION has been killed in the area. It’s all about education! I get so frustrated because the results of studies don’t get put into practice quickly enough. This program proves that involving the local communities and teaching them what we’ve found is crucial. I have never been so excited over a successful conservation project, because it doesn’t involve only scientists working their butts off, often futilely, defending wildlife against snares, poachers, and farmers in a struggle that is going nowhere; instead it involves a sustainable change in the minds of some of those who are causing the harm. Education is key. As an aside, I also found the fact that cheetahs have learned to use research vehicles and tourist vans in the Mara as lookout points from which to hunt so crazily hilarious. Stephanie had some pictures of a female who had jumped up onto her car in search of prey, and proceeded to hunt down an antelope of some kind. The best thing is that this cheetah’s cubs have learned to do the same thing, so it may be passed down for generations to come. Hope we get to witness it!

We returned to Ridgeback for what the Kenyans call a “Sundown” with Jeff, which is essentially their name for having a beer while watching the sun go down. Kay stayed at the headquarters to work on writing a grant. When we stopped at the gas station to pick up some Tuskers (the most famous Kenyan beer), there were vervet monkeys and Maribou storks just chilling right next to the gas station or on its roof. Gotta love it. We also saw our first zebras of the trip a little ways out from the road, as well as some Thomson’s gazelles and a grey heron that looks identical to our blue herons back home, except that it is gray (go figure). A silent storm lingered on the horizon, so the sundown didn’t really hold to its name, but the lightning was beautiful so we didn’t mind. Last night there were puffy Lion King-like clouds out edged in the moon’s light (I forgot to mention them). One more aside from last night- the stars here are not necessarily more numerous than at home, but they definitely seem closer and twinkle a heck of a lot more. I noticed this last time I came to Africa in the Mara, where they are even more brilliant.

By the time we got back it was raining buckets. The dinner conversation was hilarious. It centered around the darting (a very stressful endeavor, so I am discovering) adventures at camp, and Janie and I about laughed until we cried at some of the stories. One involved Kay actually giving a hyena that had been given too heavy a dose mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until it began breathing again! Can you even imagine? Another that Stephanie told was about a time a hyena woke up in the back of her pick-up truck and started whooping, scaring the crap out of her so that she and the guy she was with just dumped it out. Yet another time a hyena woke up on Kay when she was trying a new type of drug that had a reversal to it; the drug was not used for long in camp though, because the hyena woke up on her twice when she attempted to collect data.

And now I need sleep. I was kept awake last night by some sort of snorting warthog or buffalo because I wanted to see it and had to peer out the window (no luck). The zebras and hyenas were also feeling quite vocal, and this compounded with the fact that I kept having dreams that would wake me up because in them I had gone home and couldn’t get back to Africa, have made for a very tired person indeed.