The family farm sits in the Khomas Hochland, a couple of hours’ drive from Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, along roads that feel more like tracks. If you look carefully, you’ll spot a giraffe or two casually munching on nearby trees, baboons scuttling into the bush, or oryx and springbok antelope leaping across the road in front of the car.

By the time you arrive at Ruben Lambrechts’s home, you are properly in the bush: desert scrub in every direction and wildlife that treats the place less as a farm than as a shared address. A family of warthogs play in the background, a clutch of meerkats sunbathe nonchalantly nearby, a desert squirrel runs over to see who’s arrived and a young rescue zebra trails us as we explore the farm. Lambrechts, a 27-year-old cattle farmer turned entrepreneur and social-media star, is the closest thing I have encountered to a real-life Doctor Dolittle.

Lambrechts did not set out to be famous. He set out, mostly, to avoid a desk. A few years ago, homesick for the farm while working in the city, he began posting old clips of himself with the animals he had grown up with on Instagram (where he is known as @rubenamibia).

“There was one video I posted of a warthog called Kallie who went with me and my cousin in the rain. We were walking and we hid in a cave until the rain passed, because warthogs don’t like rain. In my caption on Instagram I wrote, ‘Kallie is one of the few Namibians you’ll find that doesn’t like rain, so we hid in a cave until the rain passed.’ It went viral in America first. I think everyone thought this was a wild warthog and I was helping it get out of the rain. Then they discovered Cindy the baboon and all the other animals, and my social following grew so quickly.”

Soon afterwards came the clip that truly resonated globally: Cindy the baboon, Mika the warthog and Minki the meerkat arranged, entirely by accident of temperament, in a tableau that looked uncannily like a scene from The Lion King. Set to the score of the Disney film, it went viral.

The animals, it should be said, are not props, or pets. Lambrechts was raised alongside orphaned wildlife the way other children are raised alongside siblings, because in several notable cases the wildlife was the sibling. Chief among them was Cindy – rescued as an infant from a neighbouring farm by Lambrechts’s mother, Barista – who was, by any reasonable definition, one of the family’s most senior members.

“My father was the alpha,” Lambrechts tells me, with the straight face of a man reciting an org chart. “Then my mother. Then Cindy. Then the warthogs and the meerkats and me and my brother. Then the dogs and cats.” Cindy disciplined the boys the way baboons discipline their young – a nip, a tackle, the occasional dramatic sulk – and stole with the unrepentant flair of a Riviera cat burglar: wine bottles, a whole week’s worth of fruit and, in her final and most audacious heist, a tube of her adoptive mother’s lipstick, applied with evident enthusiasm and no regard for the line. When accused, she would look about for someone else to blame – once, memorably, a passing cricket. Cindy died in December 2025 – she lived to the age of 31 – and Ruben still speaks of her like an aunt with excellent comic timing.

Then there is the rest of the household: Betsie, a warthog who likes her belly tickled, Zoey, a four-year-old mongoose Lambrechts describes as “very bossy.” Minki, the meerkat, affectionately known as Mean Minki for her habit of policing the younger ones with the zeal of a HR manager. And Melro, a zebra found orphaned by a neighbouring farmer, who was offered a donkey for company and rejected her outright on the grounds that she lacked stripes.

“I think the reason animals love me so much is that you earn their trust through daily care – taking care of them, respecting the species and knowing how to treat each one, because you can’t treat them all the same,” Lambrechts says.

“Once you earn their trust, from there on it’s really easy to get close to them. They trust you and they just love you. Whenever I’ve been away from home, you can see it once I’m back – when you pick them up they just relax and want to sleep in your arms; you can see that appreciation. You earn their trust through time. Because when they are orphaned, you are the parent figure. They don’t have anything else to rely on. You always have to try and be their parent in the hope that, one day, they can be rewilded and still practise their natural instincts. That’s what we always strive to do.”

None of this is incidental to a farm that still, first and foremost, runs cattle. Namibia is an unforgiving country – beautiful, vast, increasingly dry – and Lambrechts’s days are shaped as much by leopards as by likes. While we were there, the family was nursing a calf that had been attacked by a leopard; wounds like it are cleaned daily with no guarantee of a happy ending. It is this unvarnished proximity to both the tender and the brutal sides of nature that gives Lambrechts’s online life its charge. He is not curating a fantasy so much as broadcasting – with a decent camera and a good eye – the one he already has.

That platform now does useful work beyond entertainment. Two years ago, during a severe drought, Lambrechts began raising funds for farmers and wildlife struggling for water and feed; the effort grew into a foundation that has since supported anti-poaching work for the country’s rhinos, eased conflict between farmers and the desert elephants that periodically flatten their fences and, recently, helped kit out a local school.

“I realised I had the platform, so why not use it,” he says, with the shrug of a man still faintly surprised by his own reach. “Namibia is probably one of the most beautiful countries for me – and not because I live here but because when you travel, you truly realise it: the different landscapes we have, the different people, the cultures,” he says. “But what stands out for me is the wildlife. We have elephants, rhinos, giraffes – the most beautiful wildlife you’ll see. As an animal lover, that’s something I appreciate so much.”

He continues, “Namibia is a country with vast landscapes for the animals to roam. It makes me the happiest to see them still flourish in their natural habitat because in some countries it’s so overpopulated that the habitat is getting lost. I’m happy Namibia is not in that position. There are a lot of people doing conservation in a very good, ethical way, and that really makes my heart happy, to see these animals so happy in nature.”

As for the rest of life, the part that doesn’t involve a warthog nudging your elbow at 6.00am for attention, Lambrechts seems unbothered. He has his own quarters just along from the main farmhouse – a cool, low-slung bachelor pad with a deck and a small pool – while his grandmother and his brother live a few minutes further up the same track. They are, by any measure, a close family. After all, the farm is so remote that a social life requires some effort.

“To be honest, we’re not a lot of people – Namibia’s population is around three million – so for anybody, it’s not always easy to find the right person here. I’m still in that position where I haven’t found that, but I must say I’m very at ease and happy with where I am in life at this stage. The animals bring a lot of love and I have a lot of love for them. But definitely, one day, I’ll find the right person. There’s a show called Farmer Wants A Wife, and they regularly ask if I want to do it, but I don’t know if I want to put my love life in that limelight,” he laughs.

While watching him work – coaxing a reluctant warthog back into shot with a handful of pellets, checking on the calf, running a travel business (the family hosts guests at Simmenau Farm) – and running his foundation between it all, what struck me most was how little of it was performance. The reason the followers on all his social channels keep tuning in, Lambrechts reckons, is not the novelty of a baboon in a farmhouse but something plainer: proof that wildly different creatures, warthog and meerkat and man, can simply get on with each other.

“Different species here all live so well together. We humans have to be like that, too,” he says. “We have our differences but we still have to get on. That’s the positive message from all this.” Coming from anyone else, in any other setting, that might sound like a caption written for the algorithm. Sitting in the Namibian dust, watching a mongoose stage a small coup over breakfast, it sounds like the plainest truth in the world.