Tiny, weeks-old cheetah cubs suckled from baby bottles and purred weakly, their conditions still dangerously precarious after their rescue from the Horn of Africa’s illegal wildlife trade.
About half the cubs saved from traffickers do not survive the trauma — and there are real concerns for the smallest of this lot, a frail infant nicknamed Green weighing just 700 grams.
“It was very touch and go with Green,” Cheetah Conservation Fund founder Laurie Marker said as she inspected the mewling cub at the non-profit organization’s rescue center in Somaliland.
Photo: AFP
They are the lucky ones. Every year, an estimated 300 cheetah cubs are trafficked through Somaliland to wealthy buyers in the Middle East seeking exotic pets.
Snatched from their mothers, shipped out of Africa to war-torn Yemen and onward to the Persian Gulf, cubs that survive the ordeal can fetch up to US$15,000 on the black market.
It is a busy trade, one less familiar than criminal markets for elephant ivory or rhino horn, but equally devastating for Africa’s most endangered big cat.
A century ago, there were an estimated 100,000 cheetahs worldwide. Today, barely 7,000 remain, their numbers slashed by human encroachment and habitat destruction.
The steady plunder of cubs from the wild to satisfy the pet trade only compounds this decline.
More than 3,600 live cheetahs were illegally traded worldwide in the decade to December 2019, according to research published this year that documented hundreds of advertisements for cubs on social media platforms including YouTube and Instagram.
“If this keeps going ... that kind of offtake causes the population to go extinct in a very short time,” said Marker, a leading authority on cheetahs.
Cheetahs have been prized as pets and hunting companions since the Roman Empire, and breeding them in captivity is notoriously difficult, making wild-caught cubs the only option for ownership.
Part of the campaign to stop the trade has focused on changing attitudes in prosperous Gulf states, the main market where cheetahs are still coveted status symbols.
Wealthy owners like to show off their cheetahs in selfies as much as their cars and cash, Marker said.
“There’s kind of a one-upmanship on it, and there’s bragging power. One of our messages is do not ‘like’ this kind of thing on social media,” Marker said.
Combating this criminal trade is particularly challenging because it revolves around Somaliland, a self-declared republic without international recognition, and one of the world’s poorest regions.
About the size of Syria, with 850km of coastline facing Yemen, the breakaway region between Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia is stretched thin in its policing resources along its porous borders.
Somaliland Minister of the Interior Mohamed Kahin Ahmed said that a small coast guard unit was doing its best, but apart from patrolling for cheetahs, they have human traffickers and gun runners to contend with.
The cubs that slip through the net suffer terrible mistreatment along the smuggling route, fed improperly and confined to tiny cages, sometimes with their legs bound with zip ties.
Marker said that one particular seizure in 2019 illustrated the cruelty.
“When they dumped them out, there were live ones dying on top of dead ones ... It was just horrible,” she said.
In recent years, confiscations have soared as the government has cracked down on the trade.
From just a handful of cubs in 2018, today the Cheetah Conservation Fund shelters 67 rescued cheetahs in three safe houses in the Somaliland capital, Hargeisa.
Laws criminalizing the sale of cheetahs have also started being enforced.
In October last year, a smuggling ring was shattered and a high-profile trafficker prosecuted in a landmark trial.
Through a UK government-funded program, Somaliland is expanding intelligence sharing with neighboring countries and Yemen to fight the criminals robbing Africa of the iconic species.
But the government is also working with impoverished rural communities, whose conflict with cheetahs is another driver in the trade.
Of the 13 cubs confiscated between September and this month, at least four were taken by farmers hoping to sell them and recoup losses after claiming that their livestock had been killed by cheetahs.
“The next generation may never see a cheetah if this illicit trade continues,” former Somaliland minister of foreign affairs Edna Adan Ismail said at an anti-poaching conference in September.
Local veterinarian Ahmed Yusuuf Ibrahim is determined that this grim prophecy does not come to pass.
The 27-year-old has been learning how to nurse sickly cubs back to health and has developed a close fondness for the cheetahs under his care.
They cannot fend for themselves, and eventually will be relocated to a larger natural enclosure outside Hargeisa.
For now, Ibrahim is their doting custodian, right down to making sure cheetahs young and old get their fair share of camel meat.
“I care for them. I feed them, I clean them. They are my babies,” he said.
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