Africat

The AfriCat Foundation was founded in 1991 and officially registered as a non-profit organisation in August 1993. AfriCat has grown significantly since then and what started out primarily as a cheetah and leopard welfare organisation has over the years, identified the need to include a focus on education, research and community support as being essential to its mission. The AfriCat Foundation has four major objectives:

• To create awareness and promote the tolerance of large carnivores among the farming community by assisting farmers in effective farm management techniques.
• To educate youth about large carnivores and environmental awareness.
• To research large carnivores, particularly cheetahs and leopards, on farmland and in captivity.
• To provide humane housing, treatment and care for orphaned and injured animals.

AfriCat’s work

Namibia has approximately 6,000 livestock farms on which about 95% of the country’s cheetah and leopard live. The farmers think of them as vermin and regularly shoot or trap them. According to the Department of Nature Conservation's statistics, over the last decade nearly 7,000 cheetahs have been removed in this way from the Namibian free-ranging population. Despite being the largest single population in Africa’s remaining 15,000 cheetah, today fewer than 2,500 cheetah survive in Namibia.

AfriCat aims to initiate preventative measures to protect livestock from predators, and to educate children and the general public about the importance of these endangered species. Animals caught in farm traps are relocated to areas where they can’t prey on livestock. Those injured or in bad condition are taken back to one of the large enclosures at Okonjima to be either released there or nursed back to health and then relocated.

As a result of this work, a number of livestock farmers are now making efforts to work with Africat. By 1998 the project had been responsible for rescuing and releasing over 500 cheetah & leopard. Had there not been an organisation to help farmers in this way, these animals would have been shot. All these cats have taken up their new territories.

The Namibian Wild Dog Project

Wild dogs in Namibia are persecuted by farming communities (commercial and indigenous) who carry the belief that the dogs pose a serious threat to livestock.

The aim of the Namibian Wild Dog Project (NWDP) is to gain a better understanding of the interactions between wild dogs and humans. To do this the project combines field research into wild dog ecology with ongoing attempts to assess the community perspective and the feeling that the dogs are a threat to livestock. By linking social and ecological approaches to conservation, the NWDP ultimately aims demonstrate a clear benefit of the tourism generated by wild dogs that outweighs their perceived threat.

NWDP and the local community.

The NWDP is a long-term interdisciplinary study and conservation initiative. Working with various communities, including San Bushmen, Herero tribesmen, Namibian and Afrikaner farmers, the project uses the information gained to change the mindset of those communities. The key objective is to reduce the decline in dog numbers and to demonstrate to the communities that the dogs have a real value in terms of helping to attract tourism.

Community work at AfriCat