THE ELUSIVE CHEETAH
Sleek and slender

If the cheetah were a car, it would be a Maserati. Sleek, beautifully designed and very, very fast.

The cheetah is one of the most thrilling sights of the bush. Reliably clocked at seventy-one miles an hour, it is the fastest land mammal in the world as well as being one of the most beautiful and one of the most elusive. Bottom of the predator hierarchy, it relies on speed rather than stealth to capture prey and is somewhat hampered by blunt non retractable claws that are perfect running spikes, but not ideal for pinning down prey. Cheetahs thrive on open habitat where antelope abound. They hunt in the day, unlike most predators and do best in the absence of lion and hyena, hence their proliferation in Namibia where many of the larger predators have been eliminated.

A remarkable and potentially dangerous small gene pool indicates that cheetah must have been reduced to a tiny population at some stage, nonetheless there has been no dramatic loss of cheetah anywhere in Africa recently and the animals are now thought to number some 12,000 in total.

In 1992, the AfriCat Foundation was founded to promote carnivore conservation and animal welfare. It is based at Okonjima in Namibia, a luxury lodge between Windhoek and Etosha National Park that is the perfect base from which to track and admire these stunning creatures.