Okonjima, Namibia: 16th September 2009

This morning our work involved going into enclosures with cheetahs and picking through their poo. Yes, really.

Africat, the charity who are based at Okonjima have over 100 cats in captivity, which can’t be released into the wild – either because they are too ill, or more commonly that they were caught by poachers/farmers when young and didn’t receive the necessary training from their mothers to manage in the wild.

The majority of animals that pass through Africat get released back into the wild within 24 hours, but the young ones need to be kept on. Some of these the go into the rehabilitation programme, whereby they go into a massive 10,000 acre enclosure and are monitored to see if they’re fit to go into the wild, but unfortunately a huge leopard called TJ killed 6 of the Cheetahs last year so they had to take them all out – they are now preparing an even bigger enclosure of 16,000 acres and without TJ so they can re-start the programme next year.

So in the meantime there are lots of cheetahs in smaller enclosures (about 10 acres each, with about 3 cheetahs in each) and we had to go in and collect their poo and any donkey bones they’d left hanging around – the dirty b’stards!

It was actually good fun and in one of the enclosures Matt and I had a close encounter – one of the cheetahs took umbrage to us and did a ‘mock charge’, stamping his feet and growling. We’d been told under no circumstances to run away, so Matt just waved a stick at him and said “ah, shut it!” to which the cheetah legged it quick sharp!

Matt and I were accompanied during the work by Felix, one of the 2 local employees of PAWS (People and Wildlife Solutions: www.pawsnamibia.org), who run the volunteer programme. He’s a nice chap, 22 years old with fairly good English. Clive told us that last year Felix’s wife had died – after being attacked by a crocodile – apparently a fairly common occurrence in northern Namibia, where he comes from.

In the afternoon Clive and Felix took us on a bushman walk and explained how the traditional bushmen lived and tracked animals and how they lit fires – very enlightening!