Cheetah Outreach

After the Epic, we spent the morning in Spier and visited the Cheetah Outreach. Like me, you may not know that there used to be 100,000 Cheetah across 44 countries throughout Africa and Asia at the turn of the century. Now, we are left with less than 10,000 world-wide. Only 600 remain in S.Africa.

The Cheetah's survival has been impacted by poachers, ranchers who kill them to protect their livestock, loss of habitat, lack of protected areas from which to survive amongst smaller animals and where nature takes its course, competition from larger predators.

At Spier, a wine estate less than an hour outside of Cape Town, donated space has been provided to promote breeding, education, awareness and training about Cheetahs to S.Africans, ranchers and visitors. In addition to educating on the plight of the Cheetah, they have a program that involves training Anatolian Guard Dogs for ranchers so that they feel confident that their livestock is protected from wild Cheetah.

It's one of those places where you feel saddened on the one hand by the Cheetah's living in captivity (while you are told how happy they are and see how playful they act), yet hopeful that programs like this will aid in the Cheetah's survival long term (they are listed as Protected species in Namibia and Endangered under the United States Endangered Species Act).

New information gained. And they were beautiful creatures to behold!