A year on, Lilac the lioness roars back

ABU DHABI // The young lioness was found starving and thirsty in a Khalidya villa's garage, chained up, with her teeth crudely and painfully ground down in a misguided attempt to prevent her from harming anyone. A year later Lilac - a name given by local schoolchildren - is healthy and safe at the Abu Dhabi Wildlife Centre, with a new set of adult teeth.

Yet this week in her feeding enclosure, she paced and circled nervously, retreating as her human caretakers advanced, calling her name and making small kissing sounds. The young lioness perked up and watched, but answered with a low and menacing rumble. "Some of the other animals come up to us at the fence to greet us, but you can see Lilac's behaviour now," said Chrissie Smuts, an executive assistant at the centre. "She's doing very well, but she's a little bit frightened. She still won't trust people completely. She'll always have that trauma, I think."

Lilac was barely six months old when she was rescued, having known nothing but misery at the hands of the human keepers - later fined - who illegally harboured the African cat. When wildlife officials raided the villa on a tip from a neighbour, they found the lion cub tethered to a pole, unable to reach her water bowl. Her captors had ripped out her claws and ground down her canine teeth, exposing supersensitive nerve fibres that would have made eating agony.

"She was only a few months old," recalled Ronel Smuts, Chrissie's mother and manager of the Abu Dhabi Wildlife Centre, the open-air sanctuary where the lioness now lives. "Very underweight, and the nails were pulled off so badly in the front leg that it ripped one of the paw pads out." Mrs Smuts, a South African, flew in a dental surgeon from her homeland to extract the damaged canines while the cat was drugged, an operation that cost Dh40,000. Fortunately, the canines were only baby teeth.

A year on, the wounds on Lilac's paw have scarred over and her second set of teeth have emerged. She is routinely fed multivitamins and calcium powders, which are mixed in with her meat, and is now at a healthy size and weight. Still, she has suffered permanent mental trauma and her psychological recovery will be slow, said Ms Smuts. "When her roots were exposed, she just got used to the pain," she said. "She had no choice but to eat with the pain. It took her a while to adapt, but she's happy, she's eating, she has a mate."

Lilac's younger male neighbour, a two-year-old rare white lion nicknamed Shaggy, is still two years shy of adulthood, but the pair has already begun a kind of courtship. While Lilac and Shaggy are divided by a fence for now, in time they will share an open-air space and an air-conditioned shelter. "They can see each other, smell each other," said Chrissie. "But they're not going to be able to harm each other."

Their breeding would be the second such success for the wildlife centre, which is funded by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Presidential Affairs. Roots, another rescued lioness whose teeth also were sawed off by a previous owner, gave birth to two cubs at the centre about nine months ago. Marcelo Barcellos, the centre's tour operations manager, said the cubs, Pedro and Gabriella, will soon reach "a cut-off point" when he will no longer be able to enter the enclosure and play with them because of their size.

"He's strong," he said, pointing to Pedro. "He can remove your arm." People who illegally obtain and house lions such as Roots and Lilac have no idea how dangerous they can be, said Ms Smuts. "These owners think the lion will not be able to harm you without its teeth," she said. "But a lion's strength is so magnificent that even without teeth or claws, it can still snap your neck." As Pedro and Gabriella were born and raised in captivity, they had to be bottle-fed and hand-reared by the supervisors at the wildlife centre. Chances that they could be reintroduced to the wild in Africa are slim.

"We have successfully sent cheetahs back to Africa and rehabilitated them, but the problem with animals raised by humans out of the wild for so long is they didn't have a mother to teach them how to hunt and look after themselves," said Ms Smuts. Lilac will likely never trust her human handlers following the abuse she suffered, but any cubs she has could have a much brighter future. It is emotional but rewarding work, Ms Smuts said, particularly when new lives come out of a rescue situation.

She laughed as Lilac walked towards Shaggy's side of the enclosure and settled down. "They're saying hello to each other," she said. "Sometimes, they lie next to each other. It's a romance developing. They really like each other." @Email:mkwong@thenational.ae