From Umoya Khulula Wildlife Centre
Cassandra the serval is the ultimate hissy kitty, but we wouldn’t have her any other way!
Sadly, this year has been particularly bad for servals falling victim to the illegal pet trade. We will never understand why anyone believes a wild animal belongs in a home instead of the wild.
Thankfully, Cassandra was confiscated and given a second chance.
A chance to be free. A chance to be wild. A chance to live the life she was always meant to have, rather than being confined for human entertainment.
Since arriving at the centre, Cassandra has done incredibly well. She has grown stronger, gained confidence, and shown us exactly what a wild serval should be.
Now comes the moment we’ve been working towards. Cassandra is ready to move to a soft-release enclosure, where she’ll take the next important step on her journey back to the wild.
Every animal rescued from the pet trade reminds us why this work matters. Wild animals are not pets. They belong where they can roam free, hunt, and live as nature intended.
poor thing. I had a former coworker years ago that kept two of these to produce f1 savanna cats. they insisted the servals were happy and well cared for. I’m my opinion being “tame” Is not the same as wanting to be your pet like a dog or cat would, and that’s assuming they’re even remotely tame.
After about 2 years with captive wild animals now, seeing them as pets can be very deceptive. Most of our animals are for release back to the wild, and we do try to avoid them enjoying human company, but it seems pretty rare for them to actually enjoy our company. Even some animals that come to us before their eyes open don’t trust us.
I’ve talked a few times here about how the fight/flight model is outdated and now most people studying that kind of thing is fight/flight/freeze/fawn. Freezing and fawning can often be misunderstood as cooperation or even enjoyment, but it’s the same way we’d respond to someone holding us against our will.
Without being true domesticated animals, there are just too many instincts and things we can’t understand going on in those brains. We have animals go nuts randomly until we determine patient X reacts badly to gloved hands, patient Y doesn’t like older women, or patient Z will get scared by certain colors. The one that jumps out is an otherwise very happy baby skunk that it took us a week of being sprayed multiple times before we learned he did not like the orange protective gloves. No orange, no spray. That is a stinky and inconvenient lesson to learn, but I wouldn’t want to try to figure that kind of thing out with a serval biting random people, myself included, just to have it as a fancy pet.
thanks for sharing that. all I could think of while reading your last paragraph about the needs many of these animals have is how the type of people who get pets like this are already ignoring many of their needs just by keeping them in captivity, so it’s a safe bet they’re going to ignore stuff like a certain color scaring them.
I don’t see the appeal at all, personally.
The beauty of wild animals is in a large part the whole “wild” part. We live in parallel worlds. I imagine they’d enjoy being thrown into domestic life about as much as we’d enjoy being thrown out into the wilderness. It’s like a caged bird. Why would you want to possess something only to have its most unique attributes taken away?