Meet the wolves brought by apartheid-era South Africa to brutalize natives
Running and playing in the great outdoors. But the chain-link fence is a reminder that these wolves are not living in the wild.
They are some of the animals rescued by couple Lexi and Ronnie Austen.
The All Hearts Wolf and Animal Foundation in Hartbeespoort near Pretoria is a haven for the wolves.
They are not native to South Africa but have been bred here with dogs, sometimes to have as exotic pets.
People have handed some of the wolves over to the sanctuary because they are struggling to care for them.
Lexi and Ronnie Austen have a background in animal rescue and rehabilitation and opened their sanctuary about 10 years ago.
Caring for the wolves is a full time business for an organisation reliant on charitable contributions.
Their diet alone is astonishing, as Ronnie Austen explains.
“We take care of about 60 wolves. We’ve got a couple of hybrids in between the wolves, so you’re looking at about 67, somewhere around there of the wolves. Bear in mind these wolves eat a lot of raw they only eat raw. There’s the odd few that we’ll give a couple of dog food, dog pellets to which is kibble, but their main diet is raw. So we go through about 4.5 to 6 tonnes of chicken in a monthly period and then when it comes to red meat, we’ll get anything from like say two to three cows in a month sometimes,” he says.
That, as Austen points out, means they are struggling to continue.
The larger history of wolves in South Africa has another twist.
Experts believe they were first brought to South Africa by the former apartheid government in the 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to breed them with German Shepherd dogs.
The aim was to create a wolf-dog mixed breed that could be used by police for crowd control or by the military during South Africa’s border wars in Namibia and Angola.
Now there is no other option for them than to live at this sanctuary.
“Us as humans have brought them into our country and they can’t be released, they can’t be released into our wild. If you had to take one of these animals and take it back to its original country and try to release it, I don’t think that would work either. Why? Because the majority of the wolves that are at our facility, or should I say all of the wolves at our facility, were all hand raised by humans so they weren’t young and lived in the wild, if I can put it like that,” says Austen.
So these clever, energetic animals are a reminder of South Africa’s dark history.
“Once the military project disappeared, there was no obvious institutional role for these animals. Some ended up in private hands, some ended up in the exotic animal trade and some became deeply unwanted, because a wolf hybrid is not a dog, as I’ve explained, and they found their way into sanctuaries that you’ve seen as well, but it’s kind of a refuge for the living remnants of this old military experiment. So the wolves imported to South Africa to serve the machinery of apartheid security became the unwanted relics of that system,” says Sandra Swart, Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch University.
According to Swart, the government wanted a creature with the trainability of a dog, but with the physical capacities associated with the wolf: greater stamina, powerful bite, toughness, acute senses and most importantly, a capacity to operate in the harsh desert terrain of the border wars.
The Austens try to make it as natural as possible for the wolves, as Lexi Austen explains: “So all of our enclosures we have designed in such a way where they are offered the five freedoms. Wolves love swimming so every wolf camp has a swimming pool. We will often hang meat within the trees so that they can go and tug on the meat in the trees, and that’s an enrichment activity, we allow big vast enclosure spaces so that they can dig the dens like they like to do in the wild, so we do our utmost best, but at the end of the day the reality is nothing will ever truly mimic the wild.”
The All Hearts Wolf and Animal Foundation is not the only wolf sanctuary in South Africa.
The Tsitsikamma Wolf Sanctuary on South Africa’s south coast has operated for 25 years and says it has saved more than 500 wolves and what it calls “wolf dogs” during that time.
