Releasing Cheetahs Back Into The Wild: State of the Art at CCF

Over the past 15 years, CCF has built the vital skills and capacity to rehabilitate and release wild-born, orphaned cheetahs that have come into CCF’s Cheetah Care program. CCF has developed a protocol for this, to help ensure best results in rewilding cheetahs.

A comprehensive review of CCF’s entire release has been completed and the team at CCF has released a research paper with the findings, that were recently published in the journal Oryx,  “Recommendations for the rehabilitation and release of wild-born, captive-raised cheetah: the importance of pre- and post-release management for optimizing survival “ by Eli Walker, Stijn Verschueren, Anne Schmidt-Kuentzel, and Laurie Marker.

Some highlights:

⭐ the success rate of released cheetahs in achieving independence in the wild is high, 75-96%

⭐ careful selection of release candidates and release sites is key

⭐ orphaned cheetahs older than 6 months that have spent more time with their mother are most successful

⭐ cheetahs must be at least two and a half years of age at the age of release

⭐ pre-release training to hunt helps to evaluate release candidates and those with questionable hunting skills may not be included.

Here’s a video summary: