Cleopatra
the Cheetah
Speed is her middle name, so there’s no escaping Cleopatra! She may not be tricky, but her blind rage at the decline of cheetah populations has made her kooky…and dangerous!
Cheetahs
Did you know that 90% of the world’s cheetahs have vanished in just the last 100 years? Dr. Laurie Marker, Founder of Cheetah Conservation Fund, has developed an innovative solution that helps protect these iconic cats while also supporting local farmers. By training specially raised guard dogs to scare cheetahs away from livestock, farmers no longer feel forced to shoot these magnificent animals. The program protects cheetahs, supports rural communities, and helps preserve Earth’s fastest land animal for future generations.
Video Transcript
Their cubs, they’re quite cute. They have a really interesting chirp which is a ow, ow, ow, ow!
And through mimicry is they look like a honey badger, which is a very aggressive African animal and that’s actually a protection for them when they’re not with their mom all the time.
They kind of fly through the air. And there’s two points to the stride that they are not touching the ground at all when they’re all the way extended, and then when they’re running their tail acts as a rudder for balance.
So they’re just the best hunter in all of the savannah. Cheetahs are built for speed but not power and aggression, so they don’t have big powerful bones and big teeth, or sharp claws. Their claws are more doglike but again not being an aggressive animal. Lions and hyenas, jackals even will take the the cheetah’s food from it.
We’ve lost about 90% of the cheetahs in the last 100 years, from about 100,000 cheetahs 100 years ago to today, sadly, less than 7,500 cheetahs.
In the middle 70s, I went to Namibia for the first time. And that’s when I found that farmers were killing cheetahs. Farmers were killing cheetahs like flies. They said, “Uh, they’re horrible.” It’s a threat to their livestock.
So, I really wanted to see if there was a way that I could stop the killing. We developed use of livestock guarding dogs. We use a large breed of dog, the Anatolian Shepherd. They come from Turkey. They’ve been used for over 5,000 years to protect the livestock from wolves and bears. We breed them. We place them on the farmers when they are about 10 weeks of age. And we’ve seen a loss in livestock to the farmers that have the dogs by over 80-100%. So they have been very very effective. So that means that the farmers don’t have to kill cheetahs.
Cheetah is not a fighter, and so they will stay far away from a barking dog like that. Just to raise the dogs up and and place them, it’s about $500 per puppy that we place.
And so I’d really like to thank Endangered Species Revenge for the support that they’re giving us to help with our dog program. So it’s dog saving cats or “bucks for pups”, but we’d like to place as many dogs as we can. So please help us help Endangered Species Revenge help the cheetah.
