As I said before, at the end of Norah’s visit we went
to the Cheetah Conservation Foundation. It was a really cool experience! It is
located about 30 kilometers outside Otjiwarango on a gravel road. We were lucky
to find a taxi driver who would brave his battered car over these not-so-nice
roads, and we arrived just as it opened. Another surprise was getting the
Peace Corps discount, meaning we actually didn’t pay for our visit at all aside
from the initial taxi ride! The man working there took us to the information
center, where we were overwhelmed with everything you need to know about cheetahs and more for about an hour. I had no
idea how little I really knew about them! Honestly I didn’t even know how
to tell a cheetah and a leopard apart [in case you don’t either, it’s the
markings on the face that are the easiest indicators of a cheetah!] Namibia has
the largest concentration of cheetahs in the world, but they continue to be
threatened by farmers who believe they are eating their livestock, and often kill
them to stop the perceived threat. CCF is working with these farmers closely,
educating them and making themselves available to pick up problem cheetahs on the farms
to relocate them elsewhere in the bush. It’s a really interesting issue, and
I’ve actually become really good friends with a girl who is doing her PhD on
large carnivore-farmer conflict in the south closer to Luderitz, where there is
no organization doing work like CCF, so the animals just end up getting killed to protect the livestock.
After getting our share of
interesting facts we were led on a tour of the enclosures. CCF aims to
rehabilitate cheetahs and release them back into the wild, so a lot of the land
they own and have for the cheetahs is inaccessible to the public. Having people
around all the time would be detrimental to cheetahs getting back out into the
bush. However, a fair amount of the cheetahs at CCF it seems were brought to
them when still cubs, before they had been with their mothers long enough to
survive on their own in the wild. Because these cheetahs were never trained how
to hunt by their mothers they can never be released into the wild, they
wouldn’t make it. So these cheetahs are the ‘ambassadors’ to the Foundation, and have grown up with human interaction. Their names are really funny - one group that came in had a cub with a scar on its face, so the three of them are named Harry, Ron, and Hermione! We got to see these adorable cats up
close [as close as you can get from behind a gate], and they gave us some great
poses. We were also lucky that we were still there for the cheetah feeding,
when a couple of the volunteers at CCF gave us even more information about
their eating habits and we watched them dig into some fresh meat and organs! Overall a great visit, and well worth the effort to get
off the B1 highway!
If you're interested in learning more about cheetahs and the work being done at CCF, check out their website Cheetah Conservation Fund
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