A walk with the cheetahs

      To spend the morning before heading off to our next destination, we decided to take a walking tour with three orphan cheetahs at the N/a’an Ku sê Wildlife Sanctuary. The mother of these cheetahs was sadly killed by poachers when her children were young, but the three male offspring are now kept on a large portion of fenced-in land at the sanctuary. Cheetahs need to learn essential hunting skills from their mothers in order to survive as adults, and since these cheetahs are orphans, they would not have been able to properly sustain themselves in the wild. The three cheetahs still have plenty of land to roam on, however, deeming them still somewhat wild animals. We took a guided tour to the cheetahs’ land where we would walk alongside all three of them for about an hour. At first, the three of them ran away from us towards the other side of their enclosure. This would force me, my dad, and a hesitant German couple to bushwhack through the shrubs in hope of seeing our friends again. For about two miles, we traversed the tall grasses with the guide leading our way. In many places, there was not even the slightest hint of a trail and we frequently got ourselves caught in the thorny bushes along the way. Eventually, though, we found all three cheetahs on the complete opposite side of where we started. They hung around this area for about 10 minutes, allowing us all to get some incredible up-close shots of their faces. Cheetahs are naturally some of the most shy animals in the Kalahari Desert, so being given the opportunity to stand as close as this to three of them was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. They acknowledged our presence and seemed to be completely unbothered by our cameras. Once in a while, they would even roll onto their back and meow like a kitten. Walking back to the entrance of the enclosure, our guide frequently had to hit his stick on the ground when one of the cheetahs refused to walk. Their stubborn attitude and arrogant manner reminds me somewhat of one of my dogs back home… Sometimes, while walking, a cheetah would simply stop dead in its tracks and lay down on the ground while looking up at our guide. With a constant pace from us and the promise of breakfast, all three of them made it back to their sleeping area (a separate gate from the rest of the land), where food would soon be served.