On the evening of January 19 Kelcey Grimm received an e-mail letter. It read in part: ”You have lost control of the situation … Endear yourself to the persons who eventually look after the lions and perhaps they will give them back to you once you have a place to keep them.”
As trustees of the Enkosini Wildlife Sanctuary near Lydenberg, Grimm and her partner, Greg Mitchell, are locked in a protracted legal battle with the Mpumalanga Parks Board to establish a safe haven for their eight captive-bred lions. The e-mail came from Ken Heuer, an aviator who maintains deep personal and financial ties with individuals involved in the captive breeding and — at times — canned hunting of big cats and who has, by his own admission, transported illegal game across international borders.
Three days after Heuer sent the letter to Grimm, the parks board confiscated the Enkosini lions. Heuer provided and financed the transport on the board’s behalf. He flew his own planes and removed the animals to the Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve in Kromdraai — a game facility with which he has strong ties.
After 18 months of escalating legal confrontation with the parks board, the Enkosini matter finally goes before a judge in the second week of April in a case that animal-welfare activists say could have broad implications for the future of wildlife conservation in South Africa. The primary issue is the fate of the eight lions.
Mpumalanga conservation officials argue that the issue is simple and clear-cut: Grimm and Mitchell imported the lions to the province from Gauteng last May without the necessary permits. By doing so, the parks board argues, they forfeited their legal right of ownership, and if they lose the animals will be put up for auction.
But Grimm and Mitchell contend that the parks board acted unconstitutionally by failing to consider their application for an import permit in a fair and transparent manner, and officials in Mpumalanga and Gauteng say Heuer’s involvement in the dispute raises serious questions about whether conservation officials in both provinces were improperly influenced by a third party with potential commercial interests in the matter and deep personal grievances against the Enkosini trustees.
”This is David versus Goliath,” said Darren Bergman, a Johannesburg metropolitan councillor involved in conservation issues, in an interview. In several conversations with Heuer, Bergman said, it became evident to him that there was ”intimate contact” between the aviator and the parks board on the Enkosini issue. ”Ken is the key player.”
Heuer and Jan Muller, the manager of regulatory affairs at the Mpumalanga Parks Board, vehemently deny any coordinated effort to block the Enkosini permits.
”I have no affiliation with the parks board,” said Heuer. ”I’ve met Jan Muller once. I don’t know him from a bar of soap.”
Court papers and correspondence between Enkosini and the parks board, however, suggest a more complicated picture. The legal paper trail shows from the outset a pattern of hostility on the part of conservation officials reviewing the sanctuary’s permit applications, while e-mail communications from Heuer — such as the one he sent to Grimm three days prior to the removal of the lions — imply that he has been informed and/or consulted regularly on issues between the two parties.
”In this line, somewhere, these people have links,” said one Mpumalanga provincial official, speaking on condition of anonymity. ”It is a logical conclusion that they [the parks board officials and Heuer] would have known each other. It would have been highly improbable that they would not have consulted.”
Heuer and Muller have also denied that the lions were placed in Heuer’s care. The parks board said it merely accepted Heuer’s offer to transport the lions but retains full financial responsibility for the care of the animals as long as they remain at the Rhino and Lion nature reserve. Heuer claims he has no managerial or commercial role in the reserve.
But this, too, is not entirely clear. Heuer is head of both the Millman Lion Sanctuary and the South Africa chapter of Great Cats in Crisis, an international organisation anchored in the United States. Both are directly linked to the Rhino and Lion nature reserve.
Grimm and Mitchell first applied for a permit to import the lions to Mpumalanga in September 2001 shortly after acquiring the old Bergfontein cattle ranch in the mountains above Lydenberg. They intended to build a wildlife sanctuary and wildlife research centre on the property. The lions, which they bought from a breeder/hunter in the Free State named Marius Prinsloo, were to be the sanctuary’s centrepiece.
Letters from parks board officials to Grimm and Mitchell written over the course of the permit-application process raised a number of concerns, from adequate fencing around the lion enclosure to long-term financial viability. Nor did Grimm and Mitchell endear themselves to the parks board when they moved the lions without a permit — an action they defend as necessary to prevent the animals from falling back into the hands of breeders.
The Enkosini trustees admit that their plans for the sanctuary evolved, but they submitted detailed and revised business plans and responded, they say, to every issue raised by the parks board.
At the same time, a provincial official said, the parks board, badly shaken by scandal, was being purged from within. Lions were controversial business in the province, and no one wanted to rock the boat. As Heuer points out, not even he has been able to get a permit to keep lions in the province.
Still, the official said, Grimm and Mitchell ”didn’t get a fair deal. I’m 100% sure of that.”
But by his own hand, Heuer has revealed privileged knowledge of the Enkosini permit process and a deep personal hatred of Grimm and Mitchell that mirrored — according to affidavits from third-party witnesses — the parks board’s early and consistent contempt for application.
Grimm and Mitchell ran foul of Heuer long before they ever sought the permit. In 2000, while working for Marius Prinsloo in the Free State, Mitchell discovered that his boss was selling lions for canned hunts. A few months later, he saw Heuer flying illegal cheetahs from Namibia to Prinsloo’s Camohri game reserve. Mitchell denies that he blew the whistle, but the word got out, and he took the heat. Last December Mitchell testified against Heuer in a case regarding the cheetahs.
In an ongoing series of e-mails dating back more than a year Heuer has threatened Grimm and Mitchell with financial ruin and physical harm, accused them of duplicity and showered them with profanities. Writing to Sherryn Thompson, head of the Wildlife Action Group, on May 28, shortly after Grimm and Mitchell moved the lions to Enkosini, Heuer vowed: ”I’m going to nail them if it’s the last thing I do … Money can do anything and I have lots of it.”
In other e-mails, he revealed knowledge of undisclosed court proceedings between and attended by only the two parties — Enkosini and the parks board. In some cases, the e-mails show that Heuer possessed such information within hours of the hearings. He denies this.
Fighting a losing battle to meet the parks board’s requirements — which even internal officials quietly described as constantly shifting — Grimm and Mitchell began in December to seek suitable alternative accommodation for their lions in case they could reach no resolution with the conservation officials.
Along with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and animal-welfare organisations, they identified a couple of potential locations. Both the Mpumalanga Parks Board and the Gauteng Parks Board rejected their proposals, adamantly insisting that the lions would be taken only to the Rhino and Lion nature reserve.
On December 20, while Grimm and Mitchell were still negotiating with Mpumalanga conservation officials on an almost daily basis, Heuer wrote an e-mail to Prinsloo and other colleagues: ”We have already been asked by the authorities to take the lions and are at present building their 3ha camps.”
As Heuer told Mitchell in a phone conversation as far back as September 7 2001, he intended ”to get a hold of your lions and make them disappear into the system”. Depending on the judge, that might just happen.