Gato! (Parque Machia, Part 1)

So much time without writing! I have so much to catch up on. We are now in Copacabana, on the shore of Lake Titicaca, nearly finished our time in Bolivia. I need to empty the bathtub of words in my head about my time working with animals. We will arrive in Cusco, Peru, tonight.

Our time with Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi (CIWY), the animal refuge at Parque Machia, was unforgettable.

We arrived on Christmas day, and I was given the unexpected news that they urgently needed a female volunteer to walk with Gato, a 16 year old male puma. The felines and the Andean bear, Balu, are walked for 8 hours a day through the jungle by volunteers.

Normally two week volunteers don't work with the felines or the bear, as it takes time for the animals to trust and adapt to the people handling them...so they ask for a one month minimum. I knew this, and had put the possibility of working with a cat out of my mind. Gato only works with women. As his trails periodically cross the main tourist trail through the park, he is always walked in teams of two, one person wears a belt with his 10m lead attached to it, and another to herd people if they encounter them on the trail. Hannah was working alone, and I came along at the right time to be placed with them out of necessity. I was elated. I had read about Gato's story on the website, and was deeply affected by it, and was astonished that I would get to meet him and spend time with him. I never had Gato on his lead, I was the support walker.

At CIWY you are placed in a department, or with a specific animal, and you don't normally meet any others or spend time in other departments...this is for the health and stability of the animals.

Gato's story is very sad...he was orphaned at four months old when his mother was killed by a hunter for her pelt and he was sold to a circus. The circus attempted to train him to jump through rings of fire by striking his legs. The combination of the abuse and an outgrown cage stunted the growth of his legs and he has noticeably disproportioned legs and feet...for his torso he's kind of short. When he was two the circus passed through Villa Tunari and Inti Wara Yassa successfully had him confiscated from the circus with the help of the police. When he came into their care he was in terrible shape, aggressive, emaciated and he couldn't stand. He was severely malnourished from being fed a diet of milk and bread. A Canadian volunteer on a two week visit to the refuge was so overcome by his condition that she vowed not to leave until he was healthy, and she stayed for nine months. CIWY credits her for his remarkable recovery.

Gato cooling off in a creek bed.

On to the present, Gato is now a 40kg sixteen year old. Wild pumas have a life expectancy of 10 years, captive pumas closer to 20. I like to call him a silver fox, past his prime but still sexy as hell. He can be stubborn, occasionally lazy, cranky, but also surprisingly spry, energetic and youthful. He's a lovely golden color with dark markings on his face and a creamy white belly and chest. While he's far from being outright tame, he knows which of his trails are his. He occasionally tries to venture onto other cats trails and responds to basic commands when we have to insist that he can't. He responds to flattery - when we're trying to convince him that it's time to go home to his (approx 30 x 10m) cage at the end of the day many exclamations in spanish about how sexy and beautiful he is sometimes get him going. When we really needed to get him moving he would ignore us, pointedly grooming his paws. Singing "Vamos Gato! Vamos Gato!" in a really high pitched, whiny voice and blowing raspberry noises in his ears irritates him and also gets him walking.  He still has all his teeth, and of course all his claws.

Hanging out with Kishwana, a female spider monkey that often came to visit in the afternoon during Gato's nap.

The park has a huge network of trails. There are the official public tourist trails, and a vast network of secret trails marked by colored tape that corresponds to the animals. Some animals can't and don't ever cross, therefore their trails are in totally different areas of the park, whereas others overlap because no big crisis arises if they're near each other. For example, Gato and one of the ocelots, Millie, share some trails and if we'd hear movement in the jungle we would holler "Hola!! Gato!!" and Melissa would holler back "Hola!! Millie!" and we'd stall to let one or the other pass. It's quite impressive to walk the trails and observe how the trails have been designed for the animals interests, too. Millie has decent hunting skills, and loves to prowl creek beds looking for water snakes and rodents, so some of her trails follow shallow creeks. Gato doesn't hunt at all, his trails cross a couple of creeks but don't follow them.

The park is located about 300km south of the what's referred to as the Bolivian portion of the Amazon basin, but it was already very dense, humid jungle. I have never sweat so much in my life. It was extremely beautiful and lush. Incredible butterflies and birds and lots of capuchin, spider and squirrel monkeys. Luckily Gato takes a solid nap every afternoon, anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours, and he sets a very manageable walking pace as he patrols his trails. The first half of the day was more work as his energy level was higher and he covered more ground. The cats, the foxes and the bear have big comfortable cages hidden deep within the jungle, far from where a hiking tourist could stumble upon them. It took about 20-30 minutes to hike to his cage from the casa, the refuge headquarters at the entrance to the park.

I loved how transfixed Gato was by leaf cutter ants. He would stop on his trail and watch them for a few moments, very curious about them marching by with their big pieces of leaf. Occasionally he would try to smell them and get a bunch of ants in his nose and sneeze many times. It was really funny.

I found myself sad around him on numerous occasions. We were under orders to be very consistent about feeding him at 4:30 every day, and sometimes it's really hard to get him back to his cage. We'd coax and cajole, and he'd park himself on a trail and decide it was the time for a thorough groom. We'd make some progress and he'd protest again, sometimes growling and hissing at us. I'd look at him and feel overcome, that this is not the life he was supposed to have. I wanted to oblige his every whim...allow him to prowl Millie's trails looking for the pretty girl-cat he could smell. It's so good, however, that there is a place for him to live out his life, loved and cared for, as he never learned the skills from his mother to live as an Andean mountain puma in the wild.

Gato in his cage.

While we progressed to a familiarity where I could stroke him, even his face and head, I've seen photos of him with his head in Francesca's lap. His purr is so beautiful, it practically makes the ground vibrate.

We worked for three days when a Chilean veterinary student arrived who would be staying for much longer than us, so I was bumped to the Capuchin monkey quarantine, where about 70 monkeys live. I worked with him for another day to help get Frani oriented. I was crushed to be moved, and the park director, Nena, was really apologetic, but I fully understood that they want the animals to have the most consistent day-to-day life possible. What I didn't foresee was how much I would adore working with monkeys, and how much fun they are. About halfway through my time with the monkeys, Hannah, Gato's primary walker, had to leave Bolivia and head back to England unexpectedly. I was asked to come back and walk with him for a couple more days so it's nice that I got to see him again .