Cincinnati Zoo is saving a species one cheetah at a time

OTJIWARONGO, Namibia – With one of the highest densities of cheetahs on the planet, this southwest Africa nation has been called the "Cheetah Capital of the World." And yet, you aren't likely to see a wild cheetah on a visit here.

The tawny, black-spotted coats of the fastest land animals on earth help camouflage the elusive big cats in the dry, dusty savannas where they make their home.

But at The Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) facility here, you can see a cheetah do what it does so spectacularly, the thing that sets it apart. You can see it run. The more than 130,000-acre wildlife reserve and livestock farm, about a 40-minute drive from this small city in north-central Namibia, is one of only a handful of places in existence where that’s true.

More: Donni the cheetah grows up

Another is the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, a place with firm ties to the African outpost dedicated to saving these golden-eyed cats from extinction.

Depending on the day, the cheetah that you’ll see running in Cincinnati might be a young male named Donni.

Much like his wild brethren, Donni’s story begins with a struggle for survival. It starts not across the globe in Africa but at Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon, where cheetahs are a star attraction. That’s where, on Feb. 25, 2016, a female cheetah named Moonfire gave birth to two male cubs.

But something was wrong. Both cubs seemed to be nursing, but one was dropping weight. It turned out that Moonfire wasn’t actually producing milk. (Why is a mystery. She’s nursed healthy litters before and since.)

Donni’s struggling brother did not survive. But Donni was “a strong little cub,” as Wildlife Safari’s Sarah Roy describes him. Still, even if his mother had provided milk, the staff would have had to pull him from her after his brother died. In zoos or in the wild, a mother cheetah will abandon a single-cub litter.

“There are so few cheetahs – in the world really – that every single individual is valuable, so we're not going to let nature take its course,” said Linda Castaneda, coordinator and lead trainer for the Cincinnati Zoo's Cat Ambassador Program.

So, in Oregon, staff took shifts caring for Donni around the clock. The “little fighter” took to the bottle – and his little stuffed cheetah toy – right away. He immediately bonded with his keepers.

“He was just one of the most confident little cubs right off the bat,” said Roy, who has worked at Wildlife Safari for 13 years, 11 of those as cheetah supervisor. “He had a lot of personality from the very beginning.”

Human-raised cheetahs make good "ambassador" animals. But Wildlife Safari didn’t need another ambassador cheetah. So the Cheetah Species Survival Plan (SSP), which manages the animals living in Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA)-accredited facilities, recommended that he go to the Cincinnati Zoo. Staff there had delivered a litter of cheetah cubs via a rare C-section just 12 days before Donni was born. The thought was that those cubs could be stand-in siblings for the Oregon orphan.

So an Oregon keeper loaded Donni into a cat carrier. In it, he rode under an airplane seat some 2,400 miles to his new home.

For Donni’s wild relatives, “home” has gotten smaller and smaller, and the future more uncertain. In Africa, cheetahs have disappeared from 90 percent of the places where they once lived, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, In Asia, they survive in only one small pocket of Iran, per the IUCN.

Worldwide, only some 7,100 adult and adolescent cheetahs remain.

As the founder of the Cincinnati Zoo’s Cat Ambassador Program, Cathryn Hilker is the reason that Donni and his fellow ambassador cheetahs are there to begin with.

“What does it take to raise a cheetah?” she asks from the living room of her Montgomery home, where she’s surrounded by images of cheetahs and mementos of her trips to Africa. “Your whole life. It takes everything you are, everything you believe.”

For her, that life started with a cub named Angel. In 1980, Hilker was 49 years old and just starting the Cincinnati Zoo’s cheetah outreach program. She’d been working at the zoo for only three years.

Though she wasn’t sure how to do it, Hilker knew it could be done. She’d seen a woman named Laurie Marker and a cheetah named Khayam at Wildlife Safari in Oregon. The pair traveled around the Pacific Northwest and California, teaching people about cheetahs and conservation.

Back in Cincinnati, Hilker hit a snag right out of the gate. She didn’t have a clue how to train a cheetah to run. She had to hire someone to teach her that. But she did know animals, from growing up on the Mason farm where she’d ride a pony while clutching her cat.

And she had passion for these beautiful animals, also from a young age. When her parents took her to the zoo, she says she’d always linger in front of the cheetahs. Watching them, noticing “that brilliant way of moving, the magnificent golden eyes.”

“They were like nothing I’d ever seen,” she said. “I used to dream about cheetahs before I ever figured that I could touch one."

She is also not a woman who backs down from a challenge.

Hilker flew with her pilot husband through the rainbow of the water spray from Victoria Falls in Zambia. The plane shook so hard she thought they’d be killed. (Locals call the falls Mosi-oa-Tunya, "the smoke that thunders.")

And, though she was “scared to death,” they rafted rapids of the Zambezi River, below the falls.

So starting the Cat Ambassador Program even when people told her she couldn’t do it, when then-zoo director Ed Maruska “wasn’t that keen” on the program, was nothing out of the norm.

Her goal was to train cheetahs and other animals to be part of public demonstrations, helping people understand and appreciate those animals.

The rules were much different in the 1980s, she explains. Hilker raised Angel the cheetah at home, where she lived with her husband and young son, both named Carl.

Often, Angel would climb into the back of Hilker’s Chevrolet Chevette, behind the driver’s seat. Carrie, a mountain lion, would hop into the front passenger’s seat. Hilker’s son, Carl, would slide into the backseat next to Angel so that Hilker could drop him off at Summit Country Day School.

(Though the two big cats got along just fine most of the time, like children, they were not that friendly when they rode in the car together. Angel and Hilker's son, Carl, didn’t care for each other under the best of circumstances. So car rides were particularly problematic for Hilker. “Everybody glared at everybody,” she remembers.)

“A policeman stopped me once with this ridiculous menagerie,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Lady, I don’t even know what to say. You’re breaking so many laws.’”

Just about that time, the mountain lion took the opportunity to jump over Hilker’s lap and halfway out the driver’s side window and put her face on the officer. From her staked-out territory in the backseat, Angel leaned forward to be petted.

Turned out, the officer was a cat lover.

Hilker reiterates that the way she did things then would never be allowed now.

“If you did this today, you’d go to jail,” she said. “The zoo would lose its accreditation.

“But that’s how this started. Literally a seat of the pants."

Laurie Marker, the woman Hilker knew at Wildlife Safari, is a leading cheetah expert and founder of the Namibia-based CCF.

She wasn’t a cheetah expert when she arrived at Wildlife Safari, the same place that Donni got his start. In fact, she’d never even seen a cheetah before she went to work there in 1974.

“I thought they were the most amazing animal I’d ever seen, and I wanted to know everything about them,” she said.

So she learned, especially from Khayam, essentially the world's first ambassador cheetah. Marker raised the cub, born on Dec. 4, 1976. (It’s no coincidence that International Cheetah Day now fills that spot on the calendar.)

It was Khayam that first took her to Namibia in 1977. Marker wanted to see if the hand-raised cheetah could be taught to hunt in the wild. (She could.)

While in Namibia, Marker learned that farmers there were killing 800 or 900 wild cheetahs a year. Commercial farms now make up most of cheetahs’ range there. In fact, the majority of the world’s remaining cheetahs today live outside protected areas, so human-wildlife contact was and is a constant concern.

To a group of graduate students visiting CCF in Namibia this past July, Marker recalled thinking that if she told enough people about the problem, “they” would do something about it. But she soon came to a realization.

“There is no ‘they.’ ‘They’ has to become ‘you.’”

That’s how she found herself going door-to-door, sometimes sitting for hours talking with Namibian farmers. Making “the hard sell” that they shouldn’t kill cheetahs on their land.

After years and years of doing so, her organization has made some progress on solutions.

When he arrived in Cincinnati, Donni's progress didn’t quite go as planned. Even though he was just a week and a half older than the Cincinnati Zoo's other cubs, they’d had such a rough start that the refugee from Oregon seemed, to zoo staff, “massive” in comparison. He was just too big to safely play with them.

But Donni still needed a playmate. In the wild, he'd have siblings. At the zoo, he got Moose.

Moose is a chocolate Labrador born a few weeks after Donni. Though a dog and a cheetah might seem an unlikely pair, it’s the fifth such match at the Cincinnati Zoo.

“The relationship has varied from love at first sight to ‘what is that thing, get it away from me,’” said Cincinnati Zoo's Cat Ambassador Program coordinator and lead trainer Castaneda.

In this case, Moose was curious. He went right up to the cheetah cub – and got whopped in the nose for his trouble.

Moose retreated. But the standoff didn’t last long. The two became fast friends, playing and sleeping together.

Moose also helps Donni learn boundaries when it comes to things like jumping and biting and wrestling – lessons that his human companions can’t be the ones to teach.

But humans can help Donni form connections with those who might otherwise never get close enough to hear the click of a cheetah's toenails and the loud rattle of its purr. That connection is key to the ambassador program.

“If you don’t care about something, you’re not going to save it. It’s plain and simple,” Cincinnati Zoo senior Cat Ambassador Program trainer Alicia Sampson said.

And they have an audience: Hilker’s seat-of-the-pants program now reaches approximately 150,000 people each year through the zoo’s on-site Cheetah Encounter demonstrations, offered from April through October, and off-site school visits, which happen from November through February.

It has helped raise funds for wild cheetahs, too. When Angel, the first cheetah she worked with, died in 1992, Hilker created the Angel Fund. It has since contributed more than $1 million to cheetah conservation not only in Namibia, but also in Tanzania, Mozambique, Botswana and South Africa.

Other Cincinnati Zoo funding also supports cheetahs: For the last 11 years, the zoo has sent an average of $50,000 per year to programs in Kenya geared toward minimizing human/predator conflict.

The Angel Fund has made good on a promise Hilker had made to Angel, to work for her for the rest of her life. To help others see these animals as she sees them.

Donni, who is about three months shy of his second birthday, is reaching the age where in the wild, he’d be leaving his mother to strike out on his own. (That happens when wild cheetahs are a year and a half to 2 years old. While females are solitary when they don't have cubs, males live in coalitions, usually made up of brothers.) At 129 pounds, Donni is the largest cheetah that the Cincinnati Zoo has ever had.

Sampson compares him to an awkward teenager. He runs with enthusiasm – but not polish.

Like the wild members of his species at his age, he’ll get faster and better over time. But where their success and even survival in their place in the world is anything but guaranteed, Donni is thriving in his.

“I think he’ll be a great ambassador,” Sampson said. “He’s a very bold cat. He’s not really scared of anything.”

That has come with time, hours and hours of training and hard work by Castaneda, Sampson and other trainers who have dedicated much of their lives to doing it.

It can be exhausting: To help him adjust to the move to their building from the zoo’s nursery, a trainer stayed with him 24 hours a day at first, serving as his “round the clock chef, maid, nanny and cruise director,” as Castaneda describes it. They also form a bond during those early days.

“He knows if he’s with one of us, he’s going to be OK,” said Castaneda.

Much of his training has simply been exposure to new things (which helps an ambassador cheetah learn not to be afraid when it enters a new environment) and learning to walk on a leash.

Of course, eventually, training turned to running. A lure machine with a fuzzy dog toy attached entices the cheetahs to show their sprinting skills.

“The joy of running is in the heart and the ancient memory of every cheetah,” Hilker wrote in a 2016 eulogy for Sahara, better known as Sara, a cheetah she raised to be a Cincinnati Zoo cat ambassador.

And Sara could run: She set a world land speed record by running 100 meters in 5.95 seconds during a 2012 National Geographic shoot. No other mammal, including sprinter Usain Bolt, has ever run faster while being timed.

In April, the CCF in Namibia gave its first-ever Cheetah Conservation Award to Cincinnati's Hilker.

Throughout its existence, the organization's work to save wild cheetahs has taken many forms, including matching farmers with dogs that deter cheetahs and other predators for preying on livestock, which in turn deters the farmers from killing the animals. It has educated both farmers and local children, conducted scientific research and overseen habitat restoration.

CCF's Marker recalls that when the organization wanted to create a permanent place for her work – and for cheetahs – in Namibia, Hilker and her husband stepped in and helped with the down payment on the organization's first 18,000-acre farm.

Despite all of Marker's work, despite all of Hilker's dedication, cheetahs are still declining in the wild. Their numbers are something like half what they were when Hilker started the Cat Ambassador Program.

Even Hilker, now 86, the woman whom well-known animal advocate and Columbus Zoo director emeritus Jack Hanna once called “a Noah of cheetahs,” is worried.

“After all the work we’ve done in Africa, they’re still disappearing,” she said. “They’re still disappearing, and it just breaks my heart.”

She’s felt the strain of that, at times wondering why she bothered. What was the point?

It was a conversation with Jane Goodall a couple of years ago that stays with her now.

“She said, ‘I think that the good we’ve done will show itself in another generation … It's all going to come together. And it’ll stop. They'll realize what they're doing,’ she said.

"I have to believe that or I couldn't go on.”

And in Namibia, one big part of the cheetahs' range, there’s a tangible reason to hope.

Those farmers who were killing cheetahs when Marker first visited the country are killing them in much fewer numbers.

Perhaps even more telling is that in 1991, shortly after she arrived, Marker and other researchers estimated there were maybe 1,500 adult cheetahs left in Namibia.

“Today,” she said, “we know that there are probably over 2,000.”