This is especially for you, Greta!
This little genet is just one of the many casualties of forest destruction. As more and more people turn indigenous forests into fields, more and more animals are losing their habitats. They either have to find a refuge (such as our little patch of forest) or else they end up dying out and becoming extinct.
We rarely buy the baby animals the locals bring to us. This is because we don’t want to encourage them to kill the parents in order to sell the young. However, when a young fellow came to our shop and offered two tiny, un-weaned genet kittens for sale, O’D found it impossible to say ‘no’ to them.
Unfortunately, the young local had fed the little genets with some sadza (cooked mealie meal) and this had played havoc with their tiny systems. Geoffrey, as we later called him when we discovered he was a male, is the only survivor of a family of four.
He’s only about three weeks old in this film and missing his mother terribly. And, as you can see, the first couple of feeding times with O’D turned out to be quite a messy business!
Two weeks later, Geoffrey had settled down to his new life. An incredibly fast little runner on his short, stocky legs, he loved playing hide and seek and being chased. And whenever I picked up the broom to sweep out his rooms, he liked to run straight up me and sit on top of my head to watch. It’s advisable, by the way, to wear long sleeves and trousers around genets!
Allan Schwarz, who knows ALMOST everything about everything, has told us we have to keep Geoffrey until he’s six months old and strong enough to survive on his own in the forest. Hopefully, as genets are nocturnal and solitary creatures, he won’t find life too difficult when we let him go back to the wild.
To Watch Video Click You Tube Link Below/Copy and Paste To Your Address Bar-:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhQdcNPiYwg
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