Durban - A cheetah breeding and “rehabilitation” centre near Ladysmith has been ordered to stop commercial public exhibition of its cheetahs after at least three people were injured by some of the endangered cats in separate attacks over the past three months.
Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife issued a statement on Tuesday, confirming that the Kwa Cheetah facility at Nambiti private game reserve had applied for permits to keep cheetahs in captivity, but the permit application had not yet been approved.
Ezemvelo acting chief executive David Mabunda said the agency had decided to suspend any “commercial exhibition” of cheetah at Kwa Cheetah after the three recent attacks.
In the first attack earlier this month, an elderly KwaZulu-Natal woman had been seriously injured after being bitten on the skull and arm while inside the Kwa Cheetah fence enclosure.
A day later, 10-year-old Aidan Fry – a pupil at Cowan House in Hilton – was injured on the shoulder after the same male cheetah forced its head and front leg through the wire enclosure.
Soon after, it emerged that a third visitor had been injured on the arm by a different cheetah on June 28.
According to the Kwa Cheetah website, adult visitors pay R300 each to visit the facility and go inside the enclosure for a “cheetah interaction”.
“We allow only one public educational tour per day so as not to put any unnecessary stress on our animals. This is the only way to ensure enough funding for our animals’ food bill,” the website says.
Nevertheless, two cheetah experts from the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) raised several concerns about the facility in a letter to Ezemvelo two years ago. According to the letter, at least seven cheetahs were made available to Kwa Cheetah centre (then known as the Le Sueur Cheetah Project) between 2003 and 2008.
Release
While the intention was to rehabilitate the animals and release them into the reserve, the EWT discovered in 2012 that some of the cheetahs were being held in captive conditions and used for “financial gain in a walk, fish, pet and drive-with-cheetahs initiative”.
It also appeared from photographs on the website that captive cheetah were also being allowed to interact with leopards, domestic dogs, servals and other animals and this was “indicative of a project that is not being developed with release into the wild as the final goal”.
Kwa Cheetah spokesman Clarke Smith said yesterday that all public visits to the enclosure had been halted, pending results of investigations by Ezemvelo and Kwa Cheetah.
The main aim of the project was to release the predators back to the wild and there were seven cheetahs awaiting release once the relevant permits had been approved.
Clarke said some of the comments made by the EWT officials seemed unsubstantiated. “The project is not run for personal financial gain and in fact runs at a loss… It is a pity the letter’s author has never visited Kwa Cheetah either before making the allegation, or since, to clarify facts.”
He said that “apart from the odd scratch”, before the recent attacks, the project had an incident-free record for the past five years. “Should these investigations indicate changes are necessary to the existing procedures at the project, or if any physical changes are needed to the infrastructure, then those will quickly be implemented,” he said.
The Mercury
* We have removed the file picture used to illustrate this story. It was not taken at the Kwa Cheetah facility and paints a wholly misleading impression of events. ie that cheetahs are confined and chained up in small cages. That is not the case. IOL apologises for the error.