The Cheetah Conservation Fund is advocating for cheetahs to live free in the wild by educating farmers that they can live in harmony with their predators.
Founded in 1991 by Dr. Laurie Marker, the Cheetah Conservation Fund has housed close to 15,000 cheetahs.
As cheetahs are wild animals, most of them were released to go back into the wild, hence the need to educate farmers not to kill the animals.
"Because the cheetah is not an aggressive animal, and you can actually live with it, like the use of our livestock guarding dog, which we breed here, and we actually share it with the farming community. And we have almost 200 dogs that are working to help protect livestock, and we breed and place over 800 dogs, so it's a very big programme."
The guarding dogs mitigate any conflict between wildlife and domesticated farm animals, preventing livestock losses.
She says farmers should also think about the role they play in their livestock being attacked by predators.
"Much of that really revolved around our management strategy: having calving seasons, calving kraals, having a herder of livestock, guarding dogs with your small animals—those are all very important parts of making sure that you are playing your role to protect your livestock because so often people think that cheetahs, or rather predators, want to eat your livestock and they really don't. They want to have an easy meal, but they would rather have wild prey that they are more adapted to. So ideally, if we protect our livestock and keep enough livestock, predators can live with us in harmony."
She was happy to share that, due to the training that CCF is giving, most of the farmers have stopped killing cheetahs, which is good news as they are considered an endangered species.
Dr. Marker says there are only about 7,100 cheetahs left in the world, and Namibia is known as the cheetah capital, as 50% of those cheetahs are found in Namibia.
The Cheetah Conservation Fund currently has 27 cheetahs who were brought in as orphans and are permanent residents of the fund.
Eight cheetahs will be released back into the wild, into game-fenced reserves.