Laikipia, Kenya
A cheetah perched in the front seat of your gold-plated Lamborghini. Stick that on Instagram in Saudi Arabia and it’s the height of cool. Or a cheetah in bed with your wife in Dubai. The latest fashion among rich Arabs is buying cheetah cubs smuggled out of Africa to boast about on social media. Gangs in Somaliland are exporting at least 300 cheetahs to the Arabs each year and this represents a fraction of the losses across Africa, since hundreds of others die during capture and incarceration. Once these lovely creatures roamed India, Anatolia and the Arabian deserts, but now just 7,100 of them survive, and only in Africa. Their numbers are still in very sharp decline. When a cheetah had a litter of three cubs on the farm earlier this year, our cattle herders only told us about it after the babies had opened their eyes and moved away into the savannah with their mother.
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