Spots of hope: Some good news for South Africa’s cheetahs

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Cheetahs have vanished from 90% of their historical range in Africa.
A metapopulation project in South Africa has almost doubled the population of cheetahs in this project in less than nine years.
The program works by nurturing several populations of the cat in mostly private game reserves, and swapping cheetahs between these sites to boost the gene pool.
South Africa is now the only country in the world with a significantly increasing population of wild cheetahs, and has begun translocating the cats beyond its borders.

DURBAN, South Africa — South Africa is home to around 1,300 of the world’s roughly 7,100 remaining cheetahs. It’s also the only country in the world with significant cheetah population growth, thanks largely to a nongovernmental conservation project that depends on careful and intensive human management of small, fenced-in cheetah populations. Because most of the reserves are privately funded and properly fenced, the animals benefit from higher levels of security than in the increasingly thinly funded state reserves.