Slaughtering a goat Masai style

Thinking about what has happened over the past week, one thing that springs to mind is the evening we slaughtered a goat. This isn’t something that happens on a regular basis here, but one of our guests (a blood thirsty teenage boy) wanted to see how the Masai kill a goat. As you may be aware, the Masai also drink the blood of the slaughtered animal so I was intrigued to witness this ritual. Hence a very large billy goat was bought to camp late one afternoon. I had expected the animal to be killed by slitting its throat but actually they pin the animal down and suffocate it first. The throat is then slit and they take it in turns to drink the blood directly from the animal! Very gruesome as you end up with blood all over your face. Suffice to say, I did not try this myself! The actual meat once cooked still retained the billy goat smell and tasted pretty awful.

Finally today I saw the wild dogs which was brilliant. They are such a rare sight so I’m very lucky to have seen them. Even one of the guides who has been here three years said this was his first sighting of them. They had killed an impala not far from Wilderness so I got to watch them for 20 minutes before they headed off up the hill and disappeared into the long grass.

Our newest baby foal has been named Sheba. She is very sweet and naughty. It is great watching the three foals playing together, but the other two are a bad influence and have already taught her how to bite! Poor Santa has had an eye infection so he is now very distrustful of humans – he did not appreciate having eye ointment put in his eye for five days. Champagne is back on form now that her stitches are out and her wound has healed. She demands to be centre of attention and won’t let me spend any time with Sheba. She comes up to me and pushes me in the back, pulls at my clothes and then bites me if I ignore her! When Santa is having his legs bandaged, she comes over and tries to disrupt proceedings. Her favourite trick is grabbing the medical bag in her mouth and throwing the contents all over the ground. So Champagne and her mum are moving up to the Wilderness stables today (from the farm) to live with the rest of the herd. I am praying she doesn’t get kicked (her cheekiness could get her in trouble with the other horses) and makes some friends so that we can then take mum away and get her weaned. Santa and Sheba are going to miss her though as they both really look up to her and I feel very mean having to separate them.

I probably shouldn’t say this because something will go wrong, but amazingly it has now been over two weeks since I last had to inject a horse. Fingers crossed, they continue to stay healthy. The polo ponies had an eventful day last weekend when they went to the nearest polo pitch to practice some “stick and balling”. I had a go too and it is so much harder than it looks – you definitely need strong arm muscles as the stick is heavy. Anyway, there was lots of rain later that day and the lorry could not make it back to Lewa. The poor ponies had to hack all the way back from the tarmac road to Wilderness. Given lorries here don’t have ramps (they use loading bays instead), I don’t think I want to know how they got the horses off the lorry. The syce said they found a slope to back the lorry up to so they could get the horses off, but I strongly suspect it was not exactly level with the back of the lorry and the horses had to jump down. Nevertheless, they all survived their day out. Given how bumpy the Lewa roads are, it was actually probably preferable for the horses to walk back. In a car, the roads are terrible so for a horse in the back of a lorry, it can’t be too much fun either.

That’s about it for now. Our last guests leave on 8^th April and then the lodge is closed until the end of May because the “long rains” are due to start any day. The “short rains” are in November. Lewa is very dry now so the rains will be most welcome. I will be coming back to the UK at some point during April and May for a “holiday”. Can’t wait to see my family and friends. The last 11 months have been truly amazing and I am looking forward to reading back over my blog to remind myself of all the incredible things I have seen and done since I left the UK at the beginning of May last year.