Somalilandsun:. The 8-week-old cheetah cubs,above,should have been with their mother. Instead, they were penned up in a small village near Erigavo, Somaliland, after a group of nomadic livestock farmers chased the mother away and captured the cubs from a nearby cave.
“There were actually three [cubs],” Asma Bile, a Somaliland veterinarian for the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), told Mongabay. “One died immediately … so they brought back two of them into their houses. They were keeping them for a while.” One of the two cubs rescued near Erigavo, Somaliland on August 22, 2020. Image provided by Cheetah Conservation Fund and the Somaliland Ministry of Environment and Rural Development.
When Somaliland’s Ministry of Environment and Rural Development (MoERD) received a tip about the cubs, a rescue team, which included Bile, traveled to the village on Aug. 22. The baby cheetahs were a little malnourished and dehydrated, having only been fed small portions of goat milk and meat, which hadn’t provided enough sustenance.
These cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) are among dozens of cubs that have been rescued by the MoERD-CCF team in Somaliland this year; as of this week, CCF reported a total of 29 rescued cubs since January, three of which have died. The reason for this onslaught of rescued cubs is human-wildlife conflicts between livestock farmers and wild cheetahs, as well as the illegal demand for wild cheetahs as pets in the Middle East, according to conservationists. While the global cheetah population is estimated to be around 7,100, the local population…read full artcile on Mongabay
