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| Raised by humans: Brian Jones of Cheetah Conservation Botswana pets Duma, one of two cats that the group uses to teach people
there about the animal. Stephanie Hanes |
Speed alone can't save the cheetah
About 10,000 roam the wilds of Africa. Conservation programs are coordinating efforts to boost that number.
from the January 16, 2008 edition
Page 3 of 3
Duma shows this story, too. He and his sister were rescued as cubs after a farmer shot and killed their mother.
An effort to educate
One of the main goals of southern Africa's cheetah conservation groups is to persuade farmers to use nonlethal predator control – using herd guard dogs to scare off cheetahs, for instance, or building cheetahproof fences around grazing fields. This goes hand in hand with convincing locals that there is value in the cheetah, both environmental and economic.
In Namibia, for instance, where the cheetah population has stabilized and even grown, Ms. Marker's Cheetah Conservation Fund has held training courses for thousands of schoolchildren and hundreds of subsistence farmers, talking about ecosystem stability, the role of predators, and the unique aspects of the cheetah.
Across the border, Cheetah Conservation Botswana recently published a book called "Cheetah: A predator resource for the children of Botswana," which it hopes to distribute to every secondary school in the country. It has also held teacher training sessions modeled on Marker's program and launched a conservation video, "Spirit of the Kalahari," starring local actors.
"We deal with an integrated system of people learning to live with wildlife, predators," Marker says. "We study the needs of the people, and the predators."
More than three decades of biological research underlie these outreach efforts, Marker adds – work on everything from how many cheetah exist in a region to the cats' range and breeding patterns.
"We probably know more about the biology of the cheetah than most other endangered species," Marker says.
Conservation groups also research farming practices, such as corralling young calves, which can minimize human-cat conflict.
While conservationists say they are seeing attitudes shift, they also know they have a long road ahead.
This past year, two orphaned cheetah cubs that Cheetah Conservation Botswana had rehabilitated were shot and killed after they were reintroduced into the wild. The group had released them on property owned by a supportive farmer, but the cats had roamed onto other, less friendly land.
"It's going to be a generational thing," Jones says. "The predator-livestock issue won't be solved in our lifetime. It will be changed in the next three, four generations."
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