2 posts today!

Sivas was a very handsome example of a Turkish breed of dog called a Kangal. Lost to us in March of this year.

It was with great excitement and intrigue that I read about the Cheetah Conservation Fund, CCF, located south of Etosha, that as a side line breed Kangals! All this way from home, the strangest and maybe only export from Turkey to Namibia. I just had to go and see what this was about.

The day turned out to be another highspot of an amazing Namibia trip.

The CCF is 47,000 hectares of land set in a beautiful area just north east of the Waterberg plateau along a 44km long dirt track east from Otjiwarango. Along the way you see affluent and established farms/ranches that I had not seen anywhere else in Namibia.

The CCF is a serious conservation project, well managed, resourceful and creative, with its founder, a US conservation biologist Dr Laurie Marker, travelling the world to drum up support and spread awareness. The centre has an education and research centre, cheetah hospital, volunteer centre (taking students from all over the world), a cheetah run area, and also a sperm bank should captive breeding become the doomsday scenario.

Half of the world’s cheetahs, 3500 animals live in Namibia, but then 90 percent of them live in unprotected areas, namely farmland.

Arriving just in time for lunch the 26 captive cheetahs were being fed 1.5kg of horse or donkey meat. Their once a day, 6 days a week meal. You are immediately impressed by the knowledge of their handlers. Reeling off information on cheetah nutrition and physiology.

Each cat has a story to break your heart. They are either cubs found without a mother, but the largest number are bought in by farmers, treating them as pets until they became unruly and the back side of a belt no longer works. It is illegal to keep a cheetah as a pet in Namibia.

The CCF also have a centre in Somaliland, the unrecognised sovereign state inside the borders of what we know to be Somalia. They believe that Somalialand is the staging post for trafficking wild animals from Africa in to the Middle East and beyond. In Somalialand the CCF have confiscated 90 cheetahs either at ports, or from a domestic setting.

I was reminded of this image that has done the rounds of Instagram recently (below). And this is not me taking a pop at rich Arabs. These things happen all over the world. Memories of the guy in a 50m2 New York apartment, who was mauled by his Bengal Tiger.

If possible the CCF will return a cheetah to the wild, but this is a rare event. A policy they would re-think if numbers in the wild dropped significantly. There are already concerns about a shrinking gene pool.

It seems strange too but cheetah, unlike any other big cats, do ‘warm’ to domestication.

With 90 percent of cheetahs in Namibia living out in farmland they are at risk of being shot when they make a meal out of one of the farmers goats. This is where the Kangal breeding programme comes in.

Kangals have worked as Guardian Shepherd dogs in Turkey for 6000 years and it is in their DNA to protect, even if this means fighting with a predator, and risking their own lives. In Turkey this can be with Wolves and Bears ( or in my place, Wild Boar). In Africa, the expectation is that they take on the big cats and hynenas. These dogs are fearless. I can vouch for that. I saw this picture on Instagram recently. A Kangal has fought off a pack of wolves and the sheep is nudging him in concern and to give comfort.

Here at CCF they take Kangal puppies from the breeding pairs at two months and move them in to a pen of goats for training. I do question whether this is actually necessary. It seems to me these dogs instinctively know their duties.

Once trained the dogs are then sold to local farmers for 1500Nb (65 gbp) with the CCF doing random follow up visits to ensure that the dog is doing work intended ( protecting goats and cattle) and not lying at the Master’s feet…

There is now a waiting list for these dogs.

As one of my fellow visitors commented, it seems the project can only work for rich farmers, and not poor. Maybe so here, but I am reminded again of all those Kangals, living across the Anatolia Steppe, to poor families who will feed their dogs on ‘yal’, an oatmeal and bran mixture to which they add their dinner scraps.

Like EHRA building walls to protect water sources from elephants, the CCF training dogs to deter cats taking livestock. It is an inspiring project of conservation. Both should be pushed out at a pace.