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Echuca's Zoe Keele takes dairy farm skills to African lion park
Echuca’s Zoe Keele has lived a magical life around animals of all kinds and in any condition. But her time in an African game park, which included working with big cats (and some meerkats), has created an amazing, albeit totally unexpected, bond between Zoe and a baby giraffe.
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It was as demanding an initiation to motherhood as you could ask of an 18-year-old woman; living a world away from home and trying to deal with the stress of an abandoned baby.
But if you think your first days with a newborn were exhausting, think how much worse it could have been if your ‘baby’ was already more than 180cm tall and you needed a ladder to try to get it to drink milk.
For a woman who always wanted to work with horses but was taking on a baby giraffe without a suckling reflex, Zoe Keele thanked her lucky stars she had grown up on a dairy farm.
There she had dealt with calves born without that vital reflex and had hand-reared them as just another part of life on the land.
So when everyone at the South African Lion Park, where she was based as a volunteer in 2014, looked a little lost as to how to cope, it was Zoe who put up her hand to help.
And did such a good job of saving the baby giraffe’s life, the park named her after Zoe.
Which is a great story on its own, but since she left the park to attend university, the mother of baby Zoe the giraffe has had two more calves.
Their names are Zac and Sky.
Zoe’s brother is Zac and her beloved Malamute is Sky.
It has all built on a remarkable connection she forged in her “magical time” in South Africa.
“It was such an emotional and exciting time when baby Zoe was born and she took to my hand-feeding her — first with colostrum we got from a vet near the park and then as much as six litres of milk per feed (with two eggs mixed into it), which was just cow’s milk,” Zoe said.
“I had done this before with calves at my family’s dairy near Lockington so I thought this couldn’t be all that different — until I realised I would need a ladder because the baby giraffe was taller than me and they need about 10 per cent of their body weight a day in milk,” she said.
“They have nothing but milk for the first month before you start introducing leaves, and the baby is weaned right off the milk at six months.
“When I think about it now, humbling is the best word to describe it all. It made you feel so alive to be in South Africa, surrounded by everything from lions, leopards and cheetahs to hyena, wildebeest, springboks, gemsboks, painted dogs, meerkats and, of course, giraffe.”
Zoe described Purdy, the giraffe mother, as a “very friendly, in-your-face” animal with a great personality.
It’s just that she showed no interest in any of her babies, literally walking away from them the moment they hit the ground.
“It wasn’t just feeding the baby, we had to actually help her get up onto her feet, towel her down and get her walking — it was full on,” Zoe said.
“Zoe is a southern giraffe, a variety which is at enormous risk in the wild, with shrinking rangelands and poaching.
“In Africa so many of the wild animals are targets for poachers, plus the ones people spend huge amounts of money on to get a permit to shoot them.”
Now fully grown, Zoe the giraffe stands more than 4.5m and would probably need a cherry picker, not a ladder, to be handfed. And after her rocky start to life is as healthy as any other giraffe — and a mother herself.
To which Zoe the human laughs, and says she is too young to be a grandmother.
Trying to squeeze her gap year into a matter of months, she said her time in Africa was a dream come true. She still looks back and shakes her head with disbelief that she was there and worked with not just the giraffe but also the big cats and all the other animals.
The giraffe connection was extra special to Zoe because one of the reasons she went to this park was having read about it in one of lion whisperer Kevin Richardson’s books on his work with lions in South Africa.
“He also wrote about a giraffe called Gambit, and he was still there when I arrived, which was such a buzz,” Zoe said.
And Zoe nearly didn’t come home (much to her mother Shandel’s horror) when she was offered a job to stay on as permanent staff at the park.
“It was so tempting, even though it was hardly a well-paid job, but I had my horses at home, I was enrolled at Deakin University to do a zoology degree and, oh, yes, I had my family there as well,” she said with a grin.
Having worked two jobs — at Forever Fresh and N8 Health — to fund her trip to Africa, Zoe was now ready to work at university and get her degree.
Which certainly worked, as it were, because the day after her last exam she started work at Werribee Open Range Zoo. In 2019, after two years there, she transferred to Kyabram Fauna Park as it was “closer to home, closer to my horses (and yes, closer to Mum)”.
Now, two years later, the zoologist has turned her horse dream into a business reality and launched Intrinsic Equine, her equine education enterprise based at Timmering.
During her studies at Deakin, Zoe took every opportunity to add psychology units to broaden her understanding of all the influences on the actions of animals (including humans).
“The work I do is based around my lifelong experience with horses, which has been enhanced by my studies of, and work with, animal behaviour, training and physiology, with many different animal species — domestic and wild,” Zoe said.
“For example, the lion park where I was based in South Africa also does a lot of work in training lions, in particular, for work in movies and documentaries, and those training techniques were fascinating for me.
“I have also spent time with Australian and international eventers and thoroughbred racehorse trainers, as well as training and competing in western/stock disciplines for more than 15 years.
“I find more joy in seeing horses I have helped, out and about thriving, rather than me being in the showring competing, but I would like to think I can export my style of horsemanship to the competitive world.
“At Intrinsic Equine we believe in encouraging calm, natural and correct movement, always taking things at the horse’s pace, and we encourage horses to develop their emotional and mental control as well as encouraging correct use of their bodies.
“We allow two-way communication, allow the horse to speak and feel it is being heard, and with sound communication and a positive relationship we are able to get both horse and rider to move into any desired discipline.”
Zoe said a large part of that work was also training the rider to better understand their own horse and how they could better work together.
“Quite often you see horsemanship fly out the window when it comes to the competitive horse world,” she added.
“We believe the horse's comfort and your relationship both come before success in the showring.
“With our style of teaching we encourage relaxation, balance, softness and trust in both horse and rider.
“With these values at the forefront of training you will find your riding becomes more consistent in quality, you will be more in tune with your horse and it will be a much more pleasurable experience — for you both.”
She also covers confidence coaching, float training, horse re-education, problem behaviour, bringing horses back into work, young horse basic handling, horse training/breaking and pre-breaking, and clinics.
Zoe Keele can be contacted on 0447 431 584, zoekeele@gmail.comwww.intrinsiceq.com or
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