At Spier wine estate there’s much more to do than merely tasting wine and gazing at the valleys of the Boland. Here you can have a picnic under the trees and stroll around the garden, you can browse the African arts and crafts stalls and you can even get your face decorated with white dotted swirls at Moyo, the famous tree-infused restaurant. But at the opposite end of the farm, past the picnic spot, past the deli and the stalls, right at the end of the parking lot, there’s some serious conservation action going on. This is Cheetah Outreach, a place where I spent two months volunteering with these incredibly agile beauties.
At 8.30 every morning the eleven adult cheetahs’ enclosures need to be cleaned. This means picking up pooh and rinsing out water buckets. Completely worth it because you get to know the individual cheetahs. Yes, they all have names and no they don’t attack you. Most of these cheetahs were born in captivity or in breeding facilities around the country. Seeing as cheetahs are taught by their mothers to hunt, these won’t be able to survive in the wild so they’re used to having humans for company. They even like it.
At 10h the first visitors arrive. Volunteers answer all the questions and show them around. If they join the guided tour, they’re taken to the back of the facility where they can see the two sly little black-backed jackals, the serval, the caracal and the two tiny and adorable meerkats. These animals came here for different reasons and now they raise awareness about the farmer-predator conflict going on around the country. Farmers have trouble with cheetahs and these small predators who attack their livestock and tend to revert to setting up traps, poisoning the animals or shooting them. So the money raised at Cheetah Outreach goes toward the Anatolian Shepherd Dog Project, a very successful plan to keep both parties happy and all the animals alive.
It works like this: The Anatolians are very large, very strong and very protective animals. They are placed on farms when they’re a few weeks old and grow up with the livestock as their family. They learn to protect them with their life. When a predator comes close, the Anatolian will place itself between it and the livestock and give loud warning barks to scare it away. In most cases this is all it takes for the predator to decide to rather find different pray. At Cheetah Outreach there are about four retired Anatolians who love people and attention and live the retired life in luxury as volunteers play with them, feed them and brush them every now and then.
After doing the tour and finding out where their money really goes to, many visitors are keen to do a personal encounter with either an adult cheetah or two cubs. Volunteers give them a quick safety briefing, making more than a few foreigners very nervous at times. But these cheetahs are used to human attention and they just laze around in the sun and sleep most of the day anyway. When the visitors kneel behind them and give them a couple of strokes, that’s exactly what they keep on doing. If you’re lucky, the cheetah you meet might even start purring. Because cheetahs can’t growl and they’re the only big cats who purr when they’re happy. Just proves that these animals are living the life – food already dead and chopped in pieces, ample amounts of attention, daily massages and alone time whenever they want it.
So next time you decide to do a day of wine touring, why not stop around here? It’s the perfect way to get close to these creatures and truly be able to appreciate how masterfully they’re put together. It’s also rather nice to learn about the successful conservation efforts going on to protect these animals in their natural habitat. This truly is my happy place.
Cheetah Outreach
Opening hours: Open daily from 10h00 to 17h00.
Address: Cheetah Outreach is situated on the Spier Wine Estate, 25 minutes drive from Cape Town (take the N2 and R310 turnoff) and five minutes from Stellenbosch.
Contact: Tel 021-881-3242, www.cheetah.co.za
Cost: During the week there’s a R10 entrance fee for day visitors, and it’s R5 over the weekend. It costs R110 for an encounter with an adult cheetah and R220 for an encounter with a cheetah cub.
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