Tame cheetah and an attack

Last week a report appeared on my basic news home page (BBCnews) about an attack on a British woman named Violet D’Mello. She had been mauled by a cheetah and some difficult-to-watch video footage was also out there. The story was picked up by many media outlets all over the world. It’s gory and so on, but it does have a happyish ending. Despite nasty injuries to her head, particularly to her eyes, Mrs. D’Mello survived and by now will be well on the way to recovery from the physical injuries.

I’m not here to recap the unfortunate story, but I am interested in the whole business of keeping wild animals as “pets.” It is something I have real problems with, for a variety of reasons.

Cheetahs have been “domesticated” for at least three thousand years. Tame cheetahs were used as hunting animals during the seventeenth and eighteenth Dynasty (1550-1292 BC) in Egypt.  The best-known examples date from the time of the Moghul (or Mughal) emperors in India during the 16^th and 17^th centuries AD. They had large numbers of these beautiful cats that they used for hunting, especially of the Indian blackbuck.

This picture, in the public domain, was painted by the famous Englishman, George Stubbs, best known for this many depictionsof horses. 

 

EmperorAkbar Hunting with Cheetahs – 

Akbar the Great (1556 to 1605) was reputed to have about a thousand cheetahs tamed in this way, although it is not clear if they were all owned at one time.  Adult cheetahs, that had already learned hunting skills from their mothers, were preferred to cubs, which took a lot longer to train. The cheetahs were blindfolded and “carted.” When potential quarry was seen the blindfold was removed and the hunt was on. It all sounds very much like a falconry exercise. This picture of Akbar, which I got from an intersting site on the web here

dates from the 16th century and shows him with a large retinue in attendance.The cheetahs are hunting gazelles and blackbuck.

 

During my intern year I used to see a tame cheetah at the small animal clinic at the vet school Kenya. It was really tame and would purr away as one examined it.  I’ve told the full story in my book Wrestling With Rhinos (http://www.jerryhaigh.com/book/). 

Joy Adamson and Pippa, photo taken by Andrew Botta

 I also had to deal with a tame cheetah named Pippa that conservationist Joy Adamson “owned” and claimed to be returning to the wild. That is open to question, as she did not want to lose contact with it (something she wrote in her book The Spotted Sphinx) and continued to feed it an inappropriate diet even when it had shown that it could hunt successfully and had mated with a wild cheetah and was raising a littler. That story is also told in WWR.

There do not appear to be any other accounts of a cheetah attacking a human, so I do wonder if an important element of Mrs. D’Mello’s experience was the presence of children. I have watched, with fascination and concern, as all three of Africa’s big cats have shown an unhealthy interest in small children. I wonder if they simply see them as a bite-sized snack in some sort of atavistic return to the time when humans would have been one source of prey on the open plains. 

My first experience with this phenomenon was in George Adamson’s camp at Mughwango, in Kenya’s Meru National Park. One of the several lionesses came over as we sat and drank a coffee with George. Luckily we were inside his somewhat secure chicken-wire enclosure, part of which you can see here on the left in this paicture taken by colleague and friend Roger Windsor. Two lions are asleep on and beneath the platform in the centre. The big cat simply stared us down, concentrating entirely on the three-year-old daughter of our friends. Her eyes had that scary Yumyum look.   

 

Another of Roger Windsor's photos of George.

It is not widely known that even George’s very tame lions would occasionally maul and in one case kill a human. George was himself attacked on one occasion.

A few years later I was with friends at the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa and their small daughter was sitting on her mother’s shoulders. As we stood by the cheetah pen one of the cats came over, stretched up the wire and took a very close look at the two-year old from about a metre away. It was spooky.

Masai Mara Wildlife Populations

Linkhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8008700.stm, http://www.physorg.com/news159599572.html

A report on the BBC website (here) shows once more how wildlife populations in Africa continue to decline in the face of human population expansions. With annual increases in the human populations continuing to be over 3%, and in some cases even over 4% this is not a big surprise. When you put those numbers on to a spread sheet you soon learn that the number of people will double roughly every twenty years. The increase in human settlement has a direct effect jupon the wild animals
Of course these people need a place to live and so the number of dwellings increases, and also the number of cattle, as cattle are the main currency for the tribes in the area and even more, for the Maasai, they are the reasons to live.

Here a herd of wildebeest in the foreground is living almost cheek by jowl with cattle that are linked to the Maasia manyatta in the middle of the picture.

Hunting, although illegal inside the reserve, is another factor. It is conducted for food and profit as the bushmeat trade lends significant income for some families.

A study telling the story and conducted by a team from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has recently been published in the May 2009 issue of the British Journal of Zoology.

"The situation we documented paints a bleak picture and requires urgent and decisive action if we want to save this treasure from disaster,"

said Joseph Ogutu, the lead author of the study and a statistical ecologist at ILRI.

“Numbers of giraffe, warthog, impala, topi and hartebeest fell by 50% or more between 1979 and 2002.”

"The numbers of lions are going down. The cheetah numbers are declining. The wild dogs in the Mara system have become extinct."

By 2002, numbers of giraffe in the reserve had fallen to 20% of their 1979 levels, the bulk of those losses occurring before 1989. Topi and hartebeest in the reserve fell to less than half their 1979 levels, and almost disappeared in some of the neighbouring ranchlands where they once grazed. Impala fell by 70% in the Mara itself, while warthog fell by more than 80%, although their numbers appeared steady since 1989.

Is there any chance that human population increases will flatten out? Not much, when all the elements are factored in. The Pope has again condemned the use of condoms, and for many people large families are simply a fact of life. The doubling effect is relentless and the pressures on the ecosystem will continue.

Cheetah conservation with guard dogs

Fascinating report on the BBC website at this URL about guard dogs & cheetah conservation.

In brief, Anatolian Kangal guard dogs are being used to protect flocks of sheep & goats. This picture is right on the site, but the photographer is not named. Pity.

The Anatolian Kangal is related to other livestock guardian dogs like the Great Pyrenees which shows the same guardian and bonding behaviour if raised with the stock from about the age of 8 weeks.

“We have had amazing results," Laurie Marker of the Cheetah Conservation Fund told the BBC. She added that Livestock loss has been reduced by over 80%. Obviously these results have a marked impact upon cheetah survival, as they are determined predators of small stock. They can kill many sheep in a single night, as I have documented in The Trouble With Lions.

In the ranch land south of Etosha National Park in Namibia (learn more here) they are considered a real pest by some livestock owners.

Laurie Marker, in a banner quote on the BBC site says

“If the farmers are losing livestock they will track every predator down. But if there are no livestock loss then harmony is developed."

The Cheetah Conservation Fund, which has representatives in several countries, also has a presence in Kenya where it is based in the Nakuru-Naivasha area.

I wonder if these dogs could be used to guard against other species – like lions. They might be useful as sentinels if kept with the flocks at night in bomas where they would raise a ruckus if a predator came close. Trouble is they would be very expensive to feed. They would also have to be thoroughly and regularly vaccinated. If ranging free they might just become lion dinner, especially if a pride goes on the hunt.

Gorillas, Conservation and Trouble in Paradise

One of the very best sources of news about conservation and wildlife issues cannot be considered a mainstream source of such information, but it is very much a mainstream source of world news. It is the BBC news web site that you can find here.

Within the site it is easy to navigate to almost anywhere in the world, and two recent reports caught my eye.

The first is a well-edited film clip, is titled Turmoil Troubles Masai Reserve and its subheading reads “Kenya's tourism slump after the recent political violence is threatening the Masai Mara game reserve.” You can find the footage here.

It opens with a shot of a small group of elephants walking across the grassy plain but quickly shifts to an interview with a Maasai community leader who tells of his struggles to look after his family in the face of collapsing tourist industry income. The original post was made in March this year, and I do not have the most recent information about any recovery. Maybe a reader has more to tell us. Let’s hope it is less pessimistic than the clip.



My own shots from the Mara bring back happy memories of several visits.

The second BBC item can be found by going directly to at this URL, or accessed through the gorilla wildlifedirect spot of the blog here about the desperately difficult situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the park rangers who try to protect the Virunga area. They concentrate on two closely related things, gorillas and charcoal.

It is headed Diary: Protecting Mountain Gorillas and the sub reads “Two rangers share their experiences of protecting mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park, DR Congo".

The most recent post on the direct blog tells of a horror story in a troubled land. The heading reads Ranger Shot 12 Times and Killed in Virunga by Rebels. Over to you.

On the lighter side, for a bit of what she titles “Tee hee hee” humour about my own blog series you can go to writer, director, actor and television host (not to mention award winner) Nicole Stamp’s blog.