Foodprep

A key responsibility of the volunteers each day is to prepare food for all the animals - or "foodprep" as it is otherwise known. There is a designated area for this in one of the farm buildings, which has a big whiteboard on the wall with all the details of who eats what:

• Baby baboons - bottled milk which seems to be the same mixture as you would give to a human baby. They also have chopped fruit mixed up with mealie pap - a maize-based substance that is popular throughout Africa and similar in texture to polenta or grits.
• Adult baboons - chopped fruit mixed up with mealie pap.
• Meetkats - pieces of raw chicken, which must be hand-fed to them.
• Goats - bottled milk.
• Pigs - mealie pap mixed with chopped fruit and any other leftovers from the kitchen.
• Sylvie the Duiker - chopped apples and carrot.
• Rabbits - chopped apples and carrot.
• And so forth...

It sounds simple enough, but it takes at least an hour at the start of each day to do foodprep for whichever group is assigned this task. There is a considerable amount of fruit to be chopped - fruit that is starting to go off and wouldn't be sold for human consumption such as blackening, mushy bananas; rotting apples, papaya and mango.

And each animal seems to have its own fussy individual requirements that need to be catered to. Sylvie the Duiker has a small mouth apparently, so the apples and carrots need to be chopped a bit smaller for her. My suspicion is that if Sylvie the Duiker is that hungry, she'll find a way of getting it down.

Sylvie the Duiker who has a very small mouth

On my first day of doing foodprep, the mealie pap mixture was a lot sloppier than it normally would be. In essence, it looked, felt and smelt like cold vomit. And you have to get into it pretty much up to your elbows in order to mix it up with the vast quantities of chopped fruit. The normal procedure for the adult baboons is to make it into ball shapes which can then be thrown over the fence into their enclosure.

But on this occasion, we had to resort to scooping up handfuls of the stuff out of the bucket and then trying to fling it over the fence. The sloppiness of the mixture meant that there was a certain amount of splash-back as it flew through the air. And even the baboons looked non-plussed as it splatted on the ground in front of them.

I must admit, I did reflect on the wisdom of my decision to jack in my high-flying career as I spent the rest of the day picking bits of mealie pap off me, which had dried to a nice hard crust once the hot sun baked it on.

I can get more in, I know I can..

Any room for me in there, Marlin?

Hey guys, leave some for the rest of us