Research Trivia: Caracals & the S. African Air Force: A documentary

This is a very old video, with not good quality but it is fabulously interesting! I first saw it when I was doing a deep-dive research on caracals, while I was writing Coveted Mate (the heroine, Tamera, is a rare caracal shifter).

An air base situated in the middle of a South African nature reserve faced an unusual problem: ground birds startled by aircraft noise would launch into the air directly across the runways, getting sucked into jet engines with predictably disastrous results. Rather than resort to culling the birds, the government sought a more natural solution — a wild predator capable of keeping the ground bird population in check.

Enter this caracal family: a mated pair and their three nearly-grown kittens, who had spent their entire lives in a wildlife sanctuary in Staffordshire, England, and had never known a day of freedom. They were selected and sent to South Africa to be rewilded — taught, essentially, to be wild for the very first time. This hour-long documentary follows their remarkable journey from lifelong captivity to eventual release into their ancestral habitat.

I loved it SO much that I wanted to share, despite the obvious quality issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToXIjGV9sls