Page 19 of Her Rabid Beasts

I never found out how my mother, her wife and two husbands ended up in Ulman’s cages. We were forbidden from interacting with our parents and I didn’t even know what they looked like in human form because we were also forbidden from shifting.

My mother gave birth to three litters in her beast form. Such a thing was unthinkable before Fredrick Ulman, a renowned biologist, researcher and lion fanatic, forced it to happen.

His favourite tool was a cattle prod, fashioned into a high voltage for adult lions and a lower voltage for newborn cubs. His techniques worked so well that we no longer took our human forms at all. But instead of reducing us to changed animals, Ulman kept our human minds sharp with his style of training. Electricity as punishment and food as reward.

We were kept in outdoor enclosures, our parents in an adult cage and the kids in cub cages until we stopped bottle feeding and he’d move us to the teenage cages.

The Ulmans taught all of us cubs to read and write and paint. It was part of the tricks he made us do for the tourists who came to the wildlife park every day. It was one of the last remaining parks of its kind; the others had been disbanded by the government in the 80s. But Ulman, with his contacts, and regional location somehow managed to keep his ‘pets’, as he called us.

Unlike other animalia, we were all born as lion cubs and immediately taken from our mother for hand rearing and training.

Every time we shifted into our human forms, we were given a zap of electricity to force us to shift back. Every time we fell asleep, and shifted, we were zapped again.

That sort of training works best on cubs, but we grow to maturity slower than humans. It took most of us around four years to adapt to staying in our feline forms as we slept.

The lack of sleep would have driven us all mad if we didn’t learn. Those who didn’t learn disappeared.

All because Ulman wanted us to keep our human executive functions for the shows he put on for tourists. It was confusingfor us, but children are adaptable and we learned to read and write and think while still in our beast forms.

Ulman’s two children and wife helped rear us, but his youngest, Skye, took a special liking to the cubs, as little girls often do. She helped train us using electronic buttons that spoke words when pressed. Us cubs would run around in an arena and speak to the audience using these buttons. They would ask us silly questions, sometimes simple maths equations, and we would reply to them.

They would laugh, they would clap. We would return to our cage and do the same thing the next day. Our parents did different, more dangerous tricks made to bring in a crowd. Once a week, Ulman hosted “Killer Safari”, where humans would ride around in safari trucks and hunt them with paintball guns. Our parents would have to fall over and pretend to be dead if they got shot. To me, at the time, it looked like fun. At least they got to run around, whereas us cubs were contained in smaller cages.

One day, when I was eight, a member of the audience asked a strange question. “Do you love living here?”

I’d grown a little bold by that age and straight away pressed the button for “no” with my paw. The entire audience went silent.

That night, Ulman took me away from my siblings and made me sleep alone.

“Next time lie,” he said, sticking the electric prod up to my face.

You would think you’d get used to electric shocks after years of them, but they never hurt any less. It zinged through my little body and I was thrown to the floor of my cage.

I asked Skye a question using the buttons when her father left. “Isn’t it wrong to lie?”

“You’re an animal,” she chided. “How do you know what you’resupposedto do? Whatever us humans tell you is right, is right.”

But I didn’t quite believe her. I don’t know what made me different from my brothers and sisters but I questioned Ulman on a number of occasions. I even used the buttons to speak to the crowd in ways that weren’t allowed. Perhaps my hormones were about to kick in. I don’t know.

Eventually Ulman got sick of my probing. I was a crowd favourite and he didn’t want to put me down because I’d never been aggressive toward him. So he did something that he knew would get me to listen.

He took me away from my family.

I was sedated, not asleep and so I felt the fear of it every step of the way. The ride to the airport. Being stowed in the strange vehicle that hurt my ears and made loud noises as it glided through the sky. Ulman had some business in an illegal cub fighting ring, where he made me watch as human children with claws and fangs beat and tore each other bloody.

He leant down and said into my little ear, “This is what happens to cubs who don’t behave, Lyle. This is what will happen to your little brothers and sisters if you don’t do what you’re told.”

And so I did. I was the perfect little cub for a long, long time.

Aurelia’s breaths turn deep and heavy in that of sleep. I stare at her for a moment, waiting for her to change back into her human form, every sense of mine standing on a razor’s edge.

But she remains as a lioness.

I sigh long and low. “But that is a story for another time.” Carefully, I take her head off my knee and set her down on the stone. I climb to my feet, suddenly feeling as if some old burden has been taken off my shoulders. “I’ll come back tomorrow and we will speak again. Perhaps about nicer things.”

It’s on my way out that I see a halo of bright pink hair bobbing through the dragon trick-door. “Miss Devi.”

She stumbles but catches herself, managing to keep a hold of her glittering pink folder and armful of paper bags. My nose tells me they are filled with ham and cheese croissants.

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