When Karen Trendler started up the Animal Rehabilitation Centre (ARC) in the kitchen of her home in Kameeldrift, outside Pretoria, she had nothing but a background in nature conservation and a limitless compassion for animals to draw upon.
It was 1986 and animal rehabilitation was widely regarded at that time as a lost cause, pursued by nutcases — liberal gung-ho ‘bunny-huggers” and eccentric old ladies with nothing better to do with their time.
But Trendler was single-minded in her commitment to make ARC work.
Steadily ARC’s reputation grew, along with Trendler’s. Petite and inexhaustible, she fought tooth and nail to make headway in her somewhat controversial field of endeavour.
At first getting money to keep ARC going was one of the hardest aspects of the job, but when Sasol came on board as its first corporate sponsor, the funding floodgates began to open and the work of the centre expanded.
By 1994 the numbers of animals admitted to the centre had increased dramatically and Trendler and ARC faced the biggest challenge of their road together thus far — assisting with the rescue and rehabilitation of 4 500 oiled penguins after a bulk oil tanker sank and spilled tons of crude oil into the ocean near Dassen Island, north-west of Cape Town.
Trendler’s success led to her involvement in one of the most successful seabird rescue operations when the tanker Treasure sank offshore from Cape Town in 2000.
In 1996 ARC co-presented the International Symposium on Wildlife Rehabilitation and in 1998 Trendler restructured the centre. This saw ARC become Wildcare Africa and a 24-hour helpline established with funding from Sasol.
And from her humble beginnings, Trendler is today the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s world expert on wildlife rehabilitation.
‘It’s a remarkable turnaround,” she says, smiling wistfully. ‘Now it’s me advising and lecturing vets!”
Trendler’s work with rhinos has been groundbreaking. She was among the first to successfully foster and raise white and black rhinos, and then release them. She created a milk formula that worked well and virtually bought stocks in the brand of aqueous cream she smears liberally into their skin to prevent it from cracking.
It is a busy time for Wildcare Africa. While the Kameeldrift depot continues to act as home to Trendler, her staff and Wildcare’s clinic for injured animals, the bulk of the centre’s work has been shifted 20km away to the Kwaggasdrift Conservancy.
Three-month-old Pumpkin and four-week-old Shaka, two orphaned white rhinos remain, as do some traumatised lynx, a number of shy antelope, a selection of tortoises, Suri, the baby suricate who was hit by a car, and two very vocal African grey parrots.
As well as the move over to Kwaggasdrift comes the diversification and mobilisation of Wildcare’s services. Bases in the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga are in the process of being established, which, with the home base in Pretoria, will offer immediate response to emergencies.
Wildcare has become the leading light of wildlife rehabilitation and the inspiration for other centres, some of which are sadly not always in the best interests of their charges.
‘It’s sad but there are some rehabilitation centres which are less about animal welfare and more about making money,” explains Trendler. ‘There need to be strict policies introduced into the rehabilitation of wild animals.
‘It’s part of a bigger problem,” she adds, ‘in that wildlife has become very commercialised.”
Trendler has been on the bad end of this commercialisation, with her involvement in the rescue of the Tuli elephants being the most prominent.
The Tuli elephants were a group of young animals brought Ricardo Ghiazza from the Tuli Block to his farm outside Brits where they were subjected to cruelty at the hands of Indonesian mahouts, to ‘train” the youngsters.
Footage of the elephants was shown on popular television programme Carte Blanche and the resulting outcry resounded internationally.
She has experienced her fair share of heartache involving elephants.
‘We’ve had a number of orphans from culls here,” she says, a pained sadness coming into her eyes. ‘But they never come right.”
Culling is a sensitive issue. Trendler is a supporter of the Megaparks for Metapopulations theory that only by linking elephant populations with transfrontier and megaparks can the dynamics of elephant population be restored.
‘The conservation community seems to be split, with one side firmly against culling and the other in favour of it. I think that contraception in elephants has not been given the support it needs to prove conclusively or otherwise that it is effective. It costs R6 000 to kill an elephant and only R1 000 to administer contraceptives, surely we need to examine this course of action?” she asks.
But if culling is the answer, one thing Trendler is firm on is that young calves must not be kept back, and that entire herds must be killed.
‘The trauma of losing their families is just too great for them to bear and they need the company of other elephants. No amount of human attention can make up for the loss of their loved ones,” she says, adding that all you do by sparing their lives in a cull situation is create irretrievably emotionally damaged elephants.
She tells me the story of Olly, an orphaned elephant from Botswana which Trendler raised and which has recently been flown up to Kenya to join renowned elephant conservationist Daphne Sheldrick.
‘He was a real character,” she says. ‘And still has some real issues, he’s very temperamental and I suspect always will be, as a result of what happened to him as a baby. But I think he’ll be the happiest he can be in Kenya with Daphne,” she adds, throwing a piece of carrot to the tortoises in the pen below her.
She laughs at the smallest tortoise, the true runt of its group, with a deformed and battered shell — the scars of being chewed upon by a dog.
‘Have you ever seen anything like it?” she giggles, as the tortoise competes with animals 90 years old and 20 times its size for the same scraps of carrot. ‘Isn’t it the most adorable thing?”
Yes, I think, and the luckiest too. With Trendler and Wildcare watching over it, it is guaranteed to still be here in 90 years’ time.
Karen Trendler will be lecturing at Sasol SciFest on March 17 at 6.30pm in the Monument Guy Butler Theatre. The title of her lecture is Wildlife Rehabilitation: Science or Sentiment? She will also be taking part in a debate on elephant management at the Guy Butler Theatre on March 18 at 2pm