Cheetahs fast running to extinction as cub trade thrives

Hargeisa: Tiny, weeks-old cheetah cubs suckled from baby bottles and purred weakly, their condition still dangerously precarious after their rescue from the Horn of Africa’s illegal wildlife trade.

Around 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 (25 ounces).

“It was very touch and go with Green,” said Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), inspecting the mewling cub at the non-profit organisation’s rescue centre in Somaliland.

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 Gulf, cubs that survive the ordeal can fetch up to $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.

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.

Combatting 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.

Somaliland’s interior minister Mohamed Kahin Ahmed told AFP that a small coastguard unit was doing its best but apart from patrolling for cheetahs they had 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.

In recent years, confiscations have soared as the government has cracked down on the trade.

From just a handful of cubs in 2018, today CCF shelters 67 rescued cheetahs across three safe houses in the Somaliland capital Hargeisa.

Laws criminalising the sale of cheetahs have also started being enforced.

“The next generation may never see a cheetah if this illicit trade continues,” Edna Adan Ismail, Somaliland’s former foreign minister, told an anti-poaching conference in September.