We got back yesterday from the Cheetah Conservation Fund, aka CCF. It's a farm where they take in orphaned cheetahs and take care of them because their mothers died from the farmers shooting them. They also raise guard dogs to give to farmers. The dogs scare away big cats like cheetahs, and then the cats won't get to the livestock and the farmers won't kill the cheetahs. It was cool. They had a predator playground which had 9 steps to being like a cheetah. It showed you what they had to do in childhood and such.
Here is how Maxine described it:
This weekend I went to the Cheeetah Conservation Fund, a place where they keep orphaned cheetahs because they can't live in the wild because only their mothers can teach them about surviving. There are 51 orphan cheetahs there, and the farmers have been hunting them, so cheetahs are starting to become a really endangered species. We saw three cheetahs named Harry, Ron and Hermione. Harry was actually a girl though! They also train guard dogs that can scare away the cheetahs and other big cats so that the farmers don't kill the cheetahs for killing their livestock. There are about 3000 cheetahs in Namibia (15,000 in the world), but I have not seen any in the wild, except the blur of one running off the road.
I (Liz) had a better glimpse of that Cheetah, which we saw on a gravel road awhile back, but they are so fast that they are hard to see. Cheetah’s can go 110 km/hour (66 miles per hour)! The girls are especially fond of cheetahs this year since they are in the “Cheetah house” at Windhoek International School (like "Gryffindor" house in many ways!). The one big animal we have yet to see in the wild is the leopard.
The main road leading to CCF. We have spent a lot of time on gravel, dirt and salt roads like this. We only spent 48 km on this one though.
The entrance to CCF.
This is Harry the Cheetah (or maybe Ron or Hermione, it's hard to tell)
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