AFRICAT'S REHABILITATION PROGRAMME

AfriCat’s rehabilitation programme was initiated to give some of our captive animals an opportunity to return to their natural habitat by providing a protected environment where previously non-releasable large carnivores can hone their hunting skills and become self-sustaining. Most of these animals have missed out on all that they should have learnt from their mothers while growing up – not only hunting skills and techniques but the essential “life-skills” needed to survive in the wild. The animals have the chance to learn these “life-skills” by way of experience; often lessons are hard and unfortunately sometimes fatal: knowing what predators to avoid and when to back off and relinquish hard-earned prey, selecting prey that is the right size and avoiding injuries from horns, tusks or hooves.

Most of the large carnivores that come into AfriCat’s Welfare Programme do not require permanent captivity. Almost all of them have been orphaned and are too young to cope on their own at the time of their rescue; they require only temporary care until they are old enough to be rehabilitated and released. The majority of these are cheetahs; compared to other large carnivores cheetahs get accustomed to people and conditioned to captivity fairly quickly. Habituated cats cannot be released back into the wild as they would almost certainly be shot. The longer the period of time an animal spends in captivity the greater the degree of habituation, reducing the chance of its successful release back into the wild.

In 2000, with generous support from TUSK, AfriCat was able to initiate a cheetah rehabilitation programme. A 10 000-acre area on Okonjima was fenced off and stocked with additional game. Three groups of cheetahs with no previous hunting experience were given the opportunity to act on their inherent instincts and perfect their hunting skills. The project was successful in that the cheetahs introduced into the area were catching their own food and became self-sustaining within two months. Two of the cheetahs were relocated to a 27 000-acre private game reserve in eastern Namibia where they continued to hunt successfully.

Three spotted hyaenas that had been in captivity for most of their lives were released into the TUSK Rehabilitation Area in July 2008. Within weeks all of them were fending for themselves and very successful at finding food, whether it was through hunting, stealing kills from the leopards or just plain scavenging.

With the increasing number of orphaned large carnivores, particularly cheetahs, coming into AfriCat’s care, the Rehabilitation Programme needed to expand and escalate. The rate at which the cats could move through the programme was limited by the capacity of the area in terms of the number of carnivores it could sustain simultaneously while maintaining a balanced predator/prey ratio. The area could support a maximum of 6 to 8 large carnivores at a time but even with this number the competition between the leopards, cheetahs and hyaenas became a problem. To enable more cats to be rehabilitated simultaneously and to accelerate the rate at which the animals could move through the programme, a much larger area was needed. For this to become a reality additional land had to be acquired and the area had to be protected.

With the help of foreign investors, four of the farms neighbouring Okonjima were purchased. This land has been donated back to the Okonjima Trust to create a vast natural wilderness area to support AfriCat’s work. Fencing of a 55 000-acre reserve and infrastructure such as roads, water-points, etc., completed, the first group of five cheetahs was released into the 40 000-acre rehabilitation area within the reserve in the middle of May 2010. Another eight cheetahs (solitary, pairs and sibling groups) and a young female leopard have also been released in the last few months.

These cheetahs have been fitted with radio-collars so that their welfare, movements, progress and hunting successes can be closely monitored. The objective is that once they have proved that they can hunt for themselves and cope on their own, they can be relocated to private game reserves or released into the wild. In both cases their progress will continue to be monitored in order to assess the long-term success of AfriCat’s Rehabilitation Programme.

Besides giving the large carnivores a chance to return to the wild, the success of the project provides other substantial benefits. It gives AfriCat the opportunity to assess whether rehabilitation is a successful means of conserving an endangered population and also allows for the number of animals in captivity to be reduced.