Limpopo Valley Carnivores

family » Blog Archive » Update on the Cheetah family, on 23 Apr 2008

[…] David wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptOur next door neighbours were lucky enough to have a cheetah sighting on Sunday, close to their house. They only saw one Cheetah and said she was moving quite fast, but thought it was a female. They also commented on how dark she was, … […]

limpopocarnivores, on 23 Apr 2008

Hi, Dottie is wearing a radio-collar in the picture. I am suprised you noticed it! it is really hard to give a good estimate of her tummy with a photo taken at this angle, but I would put her at roughly a 3.

limpopocarnivores, on 23 Apr 2008

Dottie was extremely beautiful and not normally ferocious, but I agree that she looks it in this photo. This Cheetah holds a very special place in my heart. She was the first Cheetah I worked with and we really had a special relationship. She got so used to my presence that she carried on 100% as if I were not there by the end. I could walk up to her eating on a kill, follow her hunting, all sorts. The only time she got a bit fractious was when she had cubs, and even then she was quite relaxed. At one point I think I came close to overstepping the boundary of researcher and subject when she got up from the tree she was resting under and came over to me and flopped down in the shade of the same tree as where I was. This cat was wonderful and working with her was a privelige. She came to an absolutely tragic end though when trying to feed her young cubs. I had picked up her signal a km or so from her cubs one evening, but was following another cheetah so had let her go. The next morning I was veyr suprised not to find her with her cubs. She was still where she had been the night before. I walked in as normal, but was in knee high grass and ending up creeping cm by cm as I could here she was RIGHT there. When I was only a few metres away, she stood up and I was horrified to see her guts fall out. The reserve management flew a vet in from Pretoria but it was too late to save her. It seems she had ripped her underside on a stump in the grass, as there was a clean cut the full length of her. The irony is that in the previous year she had not hunted in open patches, and had stuck to thickets. She must have been desperate and reverted to “cheetah hunting style” across a clearing and just not seen a sharp stump in the grass. I was beside myself and several years on still miss her enormously. She had 6 week old cubs which we had to go in and pick up. There were 4 in total. Three were picked up quickly (I knew where she was hiding them), but 1 ran away. Snoopy and his father, Shaka, came in to help with the search and we thankfully found the remaining cub hiding under a bush. All were flown to Pretoria, but sadly cheetah cubs are very diffiuclt to rear and only 1 is still surviving. He was very friendly from the start and is now being trained to become an ambassador cheetah, to educate people about the plight of these beautiful animals.

limpopocarnivores, on 24 Apr 2008

Wow! Lots of questions! Let me get started…
No, normally nature would be allowed to take its course, but with Cheetahs being endangered, and a planned research project on teaching cheetahs to hunt and be independent meant that a decision was made to bring them in. I would not have been able to sleep knowing Dottie’s cubs were starving to death, so it was fine by me.
The lion issue is a complex one. A species may be endangered in one area and not another, but cannot be classified as being so. In South Africa Lions, and some other species, are far less endangered than the habitats they need. In South Africa there are more than there is suitable space for and the priority should be on developing conservancies, which will in turn benefit the big cats. In Southern Africa private landowners own the game on their land, which gives them a strong drive to conserve it. Conservation is not just a luxury of the very wealthy or the lifes work of the very dedicated. It is everyday life, though not always in the same form as in East Africa.
The lions here are quite fluid in social structure and are not in the cohesive prides you see in the Serengeti. The habitat is much thicker here and so many of the animals adapt their behaviour accordingly.
On Venetia there are 3 adult males, 6 adult females and 17 sub-adults 3 years and under, as well as the two new litters of cubs. I do not know the exact cub mortality rate, but it seems very low. The adults have a long life span with one breeding female on the reserve already being over 11 years old. The others range in age up to about 9 years and showing no signs of slowing down.
I am still working on the leopards! They are very shy in this area.
The neighbouring farmers are mixed, but in my opinion there seems to be a shift towards being predator friendly. It is important to remember that the landowners have to make money from their land, and to look down on them is not productive. If someone were to take money from a city persons bank account they would be most upset and do something about it, and it is the same thing. The way forward is to try to educate about better ways of dealing with the issue, such as use of dogs, and better stock managment methods. For example, someone in the Eastern Cape was able to show that if farmers move their kraals away from hills, the stock loss from leopards decreases dramatically. They were originally kraaled there for shelter. We have an open house policy on anyone that wants to come and see Pego, our goat dog, and I think he is fast becoming the most photographed Anatolian Dog ever! Most of the younger farmers are quite predator friendly anyway, and it is the older generation who want to take lethal action.
I think that our roadkill situation is about to get worse. The fences between Venetia and Mapungubwe National Park are due to come down, which is GREAT news, but it does mean that there will be more animals on the road. They will be putting in a strict speed limit and plenty of speed bumps. People speeding on reserves is a bit of a soapbox issue of mine. It really makes me cross, and I have to confess to being rather savage with people I catch doing it here.
I hope I addressed all your questions.

limpopocarnivores, on 24 Apr 2008

Well said! As I have said in previous posts, our predators that do not take livestock are precious to us as farmers because they keep out others that might. Eradication is neither ecologically nor economically sound. Better stock management is the way to go!

sauwah, on 25 Apr 2008

please do not laugh at me because it would be my dream to be a rancher/farmer in the area where you work and live. i do not mind cleaning up the animals and the work. but i am not an out door person. i have a backyard. but do i ever step outside for a minute? hell no. but that does not mean i do not treasure the wild.

wilderness or nature gives us, the human race inner peace and connection to the Creator. sadly, too many of us have lost our way and a sense of oneness with all creatures great and small. you know what they say, ” Our Lord God made them all.”