Cheetah release

Our last 2 posts covered our trip around Namibia. Since then we’ve spent 2 weeks volunteering at two animal sanctuaries which are part of the N/a’am ku sê carnivore conservation programme.

The first week was at the Solitaire Cheetah release project. Solitaire is a tiny town in the Namib Desert, consisting of a couple of farms, a gas station, a restaurant, a small shop and a bakery which is famous for its apple pies. Apart from that there are no houses, and nothing else resembling civilization. But it’s a beautiful spot with mountains behind the desert savannah.

The middle of nowhere

 

There’s a problem with human-animal conflict, whereby farmers see cheetahs as pests, often shooting them on sight, in the belief that cheetahs will kill their livestock, which does sometimes happen. The cheetah release project aims to take problem cheetahs from other parts of the country and release them back into the wild in a location which is safer for the cheetahs. The project exists because cheetahs – unlike leopards or hyenas – are highly-strung animals. With a leopard, you can simply capture it, transport it elsewhere and release it. If you do this to a cheetah it will likely starve to death due to the stress of the journey. So instead they are fitted with a radio collar and released into the huge enclosure at Solitaire (it takes 3-4 hours to walk the perimeter fence), where they can be fed and monitored for 3 months or so, before they are released close by.

At the time we were there, there were 2 wild cheetahs due for release and 6 tamer cheetahs, which had been previously used as tourism cats or were hand-reared by previous owners, so were unfit for release. Once a cat learns that people and cars equals food, that behaviour can never be un-learned, and that cat cannot be released because it will very quickly end up getting shot.  

There were 2 other volunteers with us, Jean-Marc from France and Susanne from Germany. The programme was run by a biologist couple, Matt from UK and Kate from US. Luckily we all got on well!

Jean-Marc, Susanne, Kate, Matt, Marc & Liz

Our roles included monitoring camera traps and taking part in game drives to analyse what other animals were in the area. We also got to help prepare the food and feed the cheetahs (they only eat once a week to simulate the experience in the wild) and to accompany paying tourists on 1 or 2 hour trips to see the cheetahs. Once in their enclosures we had to use radio receivers to locate their collars in order to find them, but even then it sometimes proved impossible to locate them. It’s amazing how well a 40kg spotted cat can hide, so that you can’t see it even from just a few feet away! Getting out of the car close to the cats for the first time was an unnerving experience, but after a while we got to know cheetah behaviour. They are wary of humans and after stamping and hissing would back away from confrontation with people, unless meat is involved! But generally they were calm, and you could slowly walk up to 10ft away from them to take pictures without them being at all concerned. The most common thing they do is sleep!
 

I can do 70 mph. This is just a gentle jog

I still can't get Radio 1.

  

 

Looks scary, but it was just a yawn

They are beautiful animals, and we got to know the different individuals. The thing that amazed me most is how skinny they are when they are hungry, how they will then eat a quarter of their own body weight in meat in one go, and will then look like they’re pregnant. After eating they’re hardly able to move, which isn’t surprising as it’s the equivalent of us eating us eating 80 steaks in one sitting!
 

Rubbing vitamin powder into bits of dead donkey. And this is called a holiday!

I'm hungry!

 

We did some other fun things at the project, including making cardboard zebras containing meat for the cheetahs to tear apart (whether to enrich the cats’ lives, or to keep the volunteers amused, I’m not sure) and a beautiful walk into the hills to a natural spring full of frogs. There was also plenty of timing for chilling out by the pool and spending time with the menagerie of animals at the lodge. In fact, sometimes too much time, and we got frustrated for the lack of something to do. The heat didn’t help, as it was too hot to do anything in the middle of the day except swim.
 

A rare non-striped zebra

Zebra demolished and hidden meat eaten

 

 

The spring where the frogs live

The first rain in Solitaire for 9 months

  

Our tent - home for a week

 

 

A sundowner in the cheetah enclosure

New Years’ Eve came around while we were at Solitaire. Some other volunteers from another project joined us for a night of drinking round the fire, bananagrams, dancing (Liz) and jumping in the pool (both of us). Good fun, and very different to our usual New Year.  

 

We'll post about the final week of our trip very soon. Hope you enjoyed the pictures.