Cheetah at Ka'Ingo Private Game Reserve

Ka’Ingo Private Reserve & Spa is extending its ongoing commitment to conservation with its cheetah programme. Cheetahs share the 15 500 hectare at Ka’Ingo Private Reserve & Spa with 35 other game species including the prestigious ‘Big Five’. The clean buffalo programme together with the sable breeding programme is now being supplemented by the cheetah project. At Ka’Ingo you will also find 9 out of the estimated 4000 white rhinos left in the world.

The Ka’Ingo management is inviting other interested parties to support and become part of the cheetah programme.

• Cheetah is the smallest of the large cats, and is currently one of the most endangered.
• Loss of habitat, commercial farming, and development, has all but eradicated the cheetah.
• The population of the cheetah at the turn of the century was 100,000; by 1980 it was reduced to 25,000.
• Today, there are fewer than 12,000 cheetahs, with an estimated extinction date of 6 years (approx. 2013).
• Massive population decline of up to 96% (Botswana) has been normal in the past ten years.
• Even conservation efforts are not sustainable at the current rate of decline.
• The long term survival of the cheetah depends upon the reconciliation of habitat destruction and the poaching of cheetah.
• As the states of Africa continue to modernise, many lands that compose the cheetah's habitat range are being converted into farmlands and cattle ranches.
• Contact with humans has drastically impacted on the numbers of cheetah in the wild in the past decade.
• Human encounters with cheetah have largely been on farmlands.
• Though the cheetah is protected by the CITES treaty, some African states allow for the indiscriminate hunting of cheetah on private farmlands.
• Cheetahs are viewed by farmers in Africa, much as the timber wolf is viewed by ranchers in North America.
• If the cheetah is continually hunted at its current rate by the farmers and ranchers of Africa it will become extinct within the next decade as a species.
• Wolves were successfully eradicated from England and almost completely from North America; the cheetah is continuing along this path for the same reasons.
• Currently, there are conservation groups who are trying to help the cheetah.
• These groups focus on removing cheetah from farmlands and relocating them.
• They also focus on breeding and testing new programmes to keep the cheetah from wandering into farm ranges.
• The present day population of cheetah is derived from inbreeding by those very few surviving populations and closely related animals.
• This has led to the present genetic state of cheetah such that all living cheetah today are more closely related than identical twins, with less than one percent genetic diversity as compared to a human's thirty-seven percent.
• While the cheetah is suffering from a lack of genetic diversity, those genes it does have produced one of the most efficient species of cats ever to exist.
• Because the cheetah developed over four million years ago, it needed to have specific traits in order for it to successfully compete with other land predators.
• The cheetah has a coarse coat with round black spots, and distinctive "tear" stripes down the sides of its nose.
• A small head, high set eyes, and tiny ears combine with a slender, long legged body.
• The cheetah's flexible spine, oversized liver, enlarged heart, muscular body, non-retractable claws, and stabilizing tail make the cheetah the swiftest hunter in Africa and the fastest land mammal.
• The cheetah is capable of speed up to 72 mph (114 km/h) and can maintain this speed over an average prey chase of 3.5 miles.
• At full speed the cheetah can cover a distance of 25 ft (8 m) in a single stride.
• Its prey is mainly small antelope that roam the plains of Africa.
• These creatures, while populace, are currently being forced out of their natural range by human development.
• Because of this the cheetah is forced to find new sources of food.
• This usually results in cheetah attacks on small livestock.