Visit to the Crocodile Farm!

We took a day trip to Kalima Crocodile Farm here in Lusaka with our friends Kristin and her boyfriend, Clinton. The farm harvests croc eggs and when the crocs reach 3 years old, they skin them and sell the skins for export. They also sell crocodile burgers at their "restaurant" - the croc tails are used for the meat.

The farm is run by a British man - and our guide said that they skin 1,000 crocs per year and get about $320 per skin. The main export market is to Asia.

They also have snakes (a favorite for John - NOT!), chameleons and a tortoise.

Peter and our guide, John, holding a python

Our guide mentioned that it was almost feeding time - and we got to witness a fairly disgusting event! The crocs are fed dead chickens - and when the workers rolled out the wheelbarrow with a big bag of dead chickens, you could smell it first - then saw all the flies buzzing around. The workers just stuck their hands into the bag and pulled out these nasty, dead chickens and threw them into the croc pits.

Yum, yum - love those chickens!

Crocodiles don't have a tongue, so they just throw back their heads to get the chickens down their throat. It's easier for them to eat the chickens in the water then to come up on land. The workers just whistled and the crocs knew it was feeding time, so they started swimming to the food!

We also saw the workers looking for croc eggs - they scared away a croc and started digging in the dirt, but there weren't any eggs there. They grab the eggs so they can incubate them in a separate part of the farm.

Take a look at the other photos:

http://picasaweb.google.com/miyonkautz/KalimaCrocFarm