Our day started early, at Mauricedale. It's the largest breeding farm for wildlife in the Southern Hemisphere, and we saw exactly why later on.  We were greeted on the drive in by several ostrich, and zebra mingling with tame horses wandering around on the lawns.  Our mission, already accepted whether we liked it or not, was to go into the "garden" (an area larger than some sports stadiums) and retrieve 1 male and three female soenie (pronounced sue-knee).  The plan was to set up a net starting at a fence on one side, go up to the top area and run down screaming to drive the critters into the net.  Understand, now, that these are micro-antelope.  They're little spiky things about the size of a young beagle.

Our first pass was ok.  Despite letting through a couple fast females, we caught our buck on the first go.  This, however, was the only soenie we'd have in the nets for about the next five hours.  We managed to catch a red duiker (dike-er), but that was not the mini-lope we were after, so he wandered off freaked out and free.  We eventually moved the net to another area, but that didn't help any more than in the first spot.  Finally, we started isolating small areas of brush with soenie in them that the net could go all the way around.  We quickly caught one... and had to let it go, as it was a pregnant female and no livestock operation in their right mind sells a proven breeder when you can grab a young untested one and unload it.  We did eventually catch the last two, but only after nabbing another scared little male and a  lot of frustration.

Thoroughly fed up with junior sized antelope, we moved up to the major leagues after lunch.  A Roan bull with a broken leg needed a new cast.  Roan are the second largest species of antelope, behind only eland, and this boy was full grown.  I'm a lousy estimator, but he was an easy 350 pounds and probably more.  You also can't blindfold a roan, which is unfortunate because it usually calms down everything except some sable.  Roan just go insane when they can't see, though.  This guy took his time going down, and we dashed in as always.  Justin, Mauricedale's live-in fulltime vet, was supervising as we got everything underway.  I got to put in the catheter, the first one I've ever done, which was a really cool experience. 

So, we were set up and running smoothly.  Then they fired up the generator so they could use a grinder to cut off the cast, and our boy went crazy.  Despite being doped to the gills on M99, he basically shook off four people who were devoting their full attention to his horns and almost got up.  He threw the catheter connection too, so his ear was bleeding freely while fluids ran into the dirt.  A few minutes and a lot of valium later, we  managed to resume with the generator pulled away at max distance for the cords involved.  After about half a pharmacy of valium and ketamine top-ups, they got the cast off and scrubbed the leg for the new one.  Louie basically got us a home depot model cast, with a length of PVC and some clamps to secure it to a standard large animal leg splint.  Much cheaper than the fancy human style thing they'd used before, and very effective.  Once that was on, we cleaned up and fled. 

The drive out from his pen through their big feeding grounds was incredible.  We saw literally hundreds of animals, including a ton of white rhino (and adorable babies) warthogs and piglets, sable, oryx, eland, ostrich... it's an unbelievable place.  We even dropped in on a recently captured black rhino (much rarer than white) and her calf on the way out before calling it a day.