This farm holds a special corner of my heart because an old friend, Gaatjie, whom my family and I met in Victoria West in 2007 lives here since a few years ago. Gaatjie is a female meerkat, so named for her fondness for digging small holes ("gaatjies"in Afrikaans). She was orphaned and after being rescued, she was hand reared by a family living in Victoria West.
While meerkats appear to be great pets when they are young, they are wild animals who need to live in the wild. As they get older, they tend to become unruly and aggressive if they live alone with a human family. To legally own a meerkat you also need the prescribed permits issued by the relevant environmental authorities. However, to keep a single meerkat (or even a pair) as a pet is on some level actually cruel if one takes into account the dependency of meerkats on their close knit communities.
Apart from their sheep farming, the friendly owners of the farm where the cache is located also undertake the rehabilitation of meerkats into the wild on their farm. Due to the very intricate community structures of meerkat colonies, the acceptance of reintroduced individual meerkats by existing colonies is by no means assured. The re-introduction of a meerkat into the wild includes the painstaking task of reintroducing the meerkat to the skills required to survive in the wild as well as the careful introduction between the colony and the potential new member. Neither of these tasks is guaranteed to succeed.
In Gaaitjie's case she was successfully rehabilitated into the wild and now roams the Karoo veld with her new family.
Meerkats are part of the mongoose family and they are found in South Africa, Namibia and Angola. A direct translation of the Afrikaans name meerkat is "meer = lake" and "kat = cat"; "lake cat". Neither of these elements of the name has anything to do with a meerkat as it inhabits the semi-arid areas of Southern Africa with very few lakes in sight. A meerkat is also not even remotely related to cats. It is thought that the name is actually the result of a miss-identification. The word "meerkat" seems to be related to the Sanskrit word "markat" which refers to monkey. Early eastern travellers may have mistakenly identified the meerkats as monkeys. I remember as a child that I thought a meerkat definitely looks "meer soos 'n kat as 'n hond" ("more like a cat than a dog"); but then I am not an etymologist.
Meerkats live in gangs of up to 40 members under leadership of an alpha male and alpha female. They live in an intricate system of burrows where they sleep at night. They hunt during the day and the meerkat menu includes worms, crickets, grasshoppers, small rodents, lizards, small snakes, birds, eggs, fruit, and ant larvae (which they especially love). Meerkats also eat scorpions, removing the stingers and then eating the rest. They are extremely social animals, spending lots of time grooming each other and playing with each other. Birds of prey, jackal and wild cats are the main threats to meerkats. Snakes like the cobra will enter the burrows to attack the young, but a gang of meerkats defending the pups often proves too much for a snake.
Next time you notice a meerkat running across the road, don't only think of Timone of Lion King fame, but also remember the meerkats of the Karoo.
