I am in the lucky position that my husband’s farm lies directly adjacent to the De Beers Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve and falls within the greater boundaries of the Limpopo-Shashe Transfrontier Conservation Area. We have myriad wildlife species on the farm, but also farm on a modest scale with goats. Obviously there can be conflict where predators and livestock, particularly small stock like sheep and goats, are concerned but we try our best to mitigate these issues with responsible farming practices. All our livestock comes into pens at night where it is safe from nocturnal predators, and during the day when the flock is foraging, they do so under the watchful eye of Pego, our Anatolian Shepherd Dog. This is a breed that was specifically developed in Turkey to guard sheep and goats from wolves and bears, and is being successfully used in Southern Africa to guard against predators. Pego’s job is not to attack predators, but rather to scare them off and send them in search of unprotected natural prey species. Since Pego came to live with us, we have not lost a single goat to predation. Pego does not live with Snoopy and Barclay at our house, but lives his entire life with the goats. He was put with them as a young puppy, and so associates himself with goats more than dogs, which makes him good at his job.

Pego’s skills may be put to good use in the next few weeks, as a female cheetah with cubs (as yet unidentified) on Venetia has been pacing our mutual fence line with two of her cubs. We watched them in the dwindling light this evening as she called onto our farm continually. Looking in the sand, we saw a clear set of small cheetah prints on our side of the fence, so one of them has come through. Further searching turned up the spot in the fence where the animal breached the boundary. A hole in the fence showed the pawprints on both sides, and the tuft of hair snagged in the barbed wire of the fence showed that the animal had come from Venetia onto our farm, but the high grass following this years good rain means that we could not follow his or her track for far. We agreed with reserve management to leave the hole in the fence for now, to allow the cheetah family to try to reunite. I estimate the cubs to be no more than nine months old, if that, and as such to be fully dependent on the mother for food. We have never lost a domestic animal to cheetahs, and we do not mind our predators eating the wild animals as it is what they are here to do, so if the whole family moves onto our farm, they will be welcome.

A significant part of our work here is to look at the difference in the success and survival of our subject species on protected land and on farmland, and to this end we plan to fit radio and GPS collars to a number of cheetahs to gain a better understanding of their movements across different land uses. Radio-collars are by far the cheapest option, but regular tracking quickly habituates cheetahs to vehicles, which is wonderful on protected land, but may well sign the animals death warrant on private farmland where some farmers do not tolerate the presence of cheetahs. A cheetah that has become relaxed enough around vehicles not to run off at the sound of an approaching motor vehicle, may well give a less tolerant land owner time to load and fire a gun, that he would not have if the cheetahs remained more shy. The small farm size in the area of an average of approximately 2000 hectares means that the cheetahs will cross many peoples’ land in the course of their lives, and tracking them becomes very difficult when you have to get each landowners permission.

This work with the cheetahs in South Africa is extremely important as it is thought that more of them live on private farmland than on protected areas, and so a full understanding of how they operate here is essential to devising long term conservation strategies for cheetahs in this country. We desperately need GPS collars. We have a permit to fit collars to five cheetahs, but only have funding for two GPS collars. We will be putting all donations, unless otherwise specified, towards these collars which are so essential to this work which I believe is it at the heart of cheetah conservation in the world in which we live today.

I would like to sincerely thank Andrew F for his generous donation, which we will be putting into our fund for GPS collars.

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