RUBEN'S MENAGERIE

This Namibian farmer has earned a global fan club thanks to his adorable videos of the wild animals that thrive on his farm

- PIETER VAN ZYL

FANS can’t get enough of the videos he posts of his menagerie. From meerkats to mongooses, warthogs to baboons, there’s never a dull moment on this farm in Namibia.

But it’s not just the wildlife that has millions of people hooked – the young cattle farmer responsible for all the posts is pretty compelling too.

And his followers aren’t backward in coming forward, as Ruben Lambrechts (25) has discovered.

“I get a lot of messages asking if I have an OnlyFans account and if I want to sell pictures of myself,” he says. “There are many sexual offers.”

He’s also had more marriage proposals than he can remember, along with a few bizarre requests.

“The strangest message I ever got was someone offering to pay me N$200 [R200] per gram for my pubic hair,” Ruben recalls. “I was very tempted to send Cindy’s hair.”

Cindy, as fans will know, is the baboon matriarch who lives on the farm with her troop.

“I grew up with Cindy. She’s like my sister,” Ruben says over video call from the farm near Windhoek, where he lives with his parents, Malan and Barista, and twin brother, Tertius.

Even though it’s a cold winter day he’s in shorts and barefoot, which is his regular attire for most of the year on the farm, where he works as a tour guide and shares his love of the natural world with visitors.

“My parents started rescuing animals four years before I was born,” Ruben says. “My earliest memories and photos are of me with Cindy and a zebra foal.”

On a whim Ruben decided to start sharing episodes of his farm life on social media last year. He soon had a following of 4 000 but it was after he posted a video of him and his cousin, Lara Cronjé, in the rain with Kallie the warthog that the likes really started flooding in.