“Come, Come, Come, Emma!”

Oh, these spotted pussy cats are keeping us on our toes around here! There’s rarely a dull day at CCF – there’s always some interesting thing happening or some crisis going on, especially when the cheetahs are involved… This time around it was one of our “wild girls”, Emma that caused havoc with her antics.

The “wild girls” are four female cheetahs that are kept together in one area on the farm known as Bellebeno, which holds most of our cats. There are three main fenced areas at Bellebeno; the biggest one is about 60ha, with two smaller areas that are 5ha and 1ha in size. The 60ha area houses 11 female cats, including the chocolate girls I mentioned in previous blogs. Four male cheetahs (known as “the Scientists”) are kept in the 5ha area, and until recently the wild girls were kept in the 1ha area. As you might have guessed by their nick name, these girls are possibly the wildest of all the captive cheetahs we have at CCF and are very wary of people.

Every day, one of our cheetah keepers (usually with a few volunteers) drives out to Bellebeno to feed all the cats. As Bellebeno is 20-odd km away on a pretty rough dirt road, feeding these cats usually takes a few hours. On arriving at Bellebeno, you are greeted by several hissing, spitting, growling felines that are in the big fenced area. These are our bold females that aren’t afraid of voicing their opinions of us, despite the large chunks of raw meat we have for them. The general method of feeding these cats is by driving through their large pen and letting them run behind the bakkie for a bit of exercise before throwing their pieces of meat to each cat individually. Throughout this whole exercise, the cheetah keepers shout “come, come, come” or “come on, come on” to get the cheetahs to come to the bakkie. On an average day, all of the ‘ladies’ pitch up for their meat as you drive through the area and everyone gets their fair share.

For the cheetahs in the smaller areas, feeding is a bit different – we usually park the bakkie outside the fences and call until all the cats show up, at which point we hurl the pieces of meat over the fence until they all get their piece. It is rather entertaining to watch them grab their meat, whilst still growling and spitting at us, and then turn and run off holding the meat high like it’s a great prize they’ve just earned.

So although that was the general modus operandi and everything ran pretty smoothly, it was not an ideal situation. According to law, in Namibia if you keep cheetahs in captivity it has to be at a density of no less than 1ha per cat. The four wild girls were meant to be kept in their 1ha pen only for a short period of time, before exporting them to the Smithsonian in America where they have a cheetah breeding programme. However, the Namibian authorities seem to be particularly sticky about exporting cheetahs and they have not issued CCF with permits to export them. It seems as though they will never issue the permits we need, so that means we need to move the wild girls into a bigger pen. Seeing that the 60ha pen is far below its cheetah capacity, the best option was to let the wild girls out into this area…

I was with Kate, one of the cheetah keepers, when we opened the gates of the small area and coaxed the girls out with their meat for the day. They came out very cautiously, as they were not comfortable having to grab their pieces right in front of us with no fence between us. Eventually, all the girls took their meat and started eating it in the area between their small pen and the big pen (the buffer zone). With fingers crossed, hoping that we would see them in the big area the next day, we left them to eat. The next day came, and only one of the girls – Xena (the boldest of the four and the only unrelated female of the group) – came to the bakkie for meat. The three sisters were all missing in action; they were clearly not bold enough yet to come to the bakkie in response to the keepers’ calls – “come on, come on!”. For a cheetah to miss one day of food is not a crisis, so they just hoped that the next day the three girls would be hungry enough to pluck up the courage to come to the bakkie.

Day two came and still no sign of the three sisters. The next day, Kate and Matt decided to stake out the only water hole in Bellebeno, knowing that the girls would have to come for a drink at some point. The plan worked for two of the girls (Minja and Jacomina) that came to the waterhole and were enticed into their pen with meat. One of the sisters, however, refused to come to the area – her name is Emma. That afternoon it was all hands on deck – nearly all CCF staff and volunteers were summonsed to Bellebeno to search for Emma.

Searching for one specific cheetah in a 60ha area that contains 11 other cats that only the keepers can identify with 100% certainty is rather an impossible mission. This is compounded by the fact that the grass in Bellebeno cannot be mowed (too many bushes, holes and rocks for a tractor to mow it), so is therefore waist-high in most places. The first day of searching resulted in them actually finding her, but she escaped by running past the people trying to herd her and then disappeared into the long grass.

The next day, the keepers removed all other cats from the area and put them in the 1ha pen – it would be quite crowded, but it would have to do until we found Emma. Now ten people searching for one cheetah in a large, over-grown pen is a rather amusing (although frustrating for the searchers) process... Everyone is equipped with a cheetah-deterring stick so that if we encounter her we can protect ourselves and/or prevent her from running past us by putting the stick in the way. We then form a long straight line (with about 5-10m between people) at a specific point in the pen. When everyone is ready, we advance, with our sticks, marching through the long grass -dodging Acacias and trying not to step on any snakes in the grass. Throughout the process, we make as much noise as possible to try and scare her into running away from us and towards the pen where we want her to enter. For lack of imagination, we would shout either “Come, come, come!” or “Come on, come on!” or “Emma, Emma, Emma!”. When we got bored of shouting the same things, some of us started singing songs (one girl sang songs from the Lion King), one of the guys shouted “Emma, I love you!” and I started shouting “come out, come out, wherever you are!” amongst other random chants. If an uninformed person landed out there in the middle of the pen, they would be certain that we'd all lost our minds and needed to be shot!

On one day, we saw her, but she once again managed to run between two people just before we could close ranks on her. That afternoon, the keepers decided to put meat down for her in the buffer zone (she had now gone four days without food). The next day, she had eaten the meat we put down, but we still couldn't find her, despite walking the half of the pen where the keepers thought she would most likely be hiding. On the final day of searching, we walked the whole length of the pen, but once again did not find her, although she had once again eaten the meat in the buffer zone. After days of searching with no success, everyone was starting to feel frustrated and began doubting that we would ever be able to catch her. The keepers decided that we needed a new game plan – they would put meat down that evening and then stake out the buffer zone, waiting for her to enter, once she was in we would close the gates behind her using ropes attached to the gates.

That afternoon, Kate went out to put the food down and set up the “trap” gates to the buffer zone. Half an hour after she left, we suddenly got a very excited radio call: “I got her, I got her, I got her!!!” we were all most amazed, as Kate hadn’t even had enough time to set up the trap for her. When she got back, Kate explained that as they went into Bellebeno and were driving towards the buffer zone, they noticed a cat in the buffer zone already. Knowing that it had to be Emma, Kate rushed up to the buffer zone (at which Emma ran away from her, thankfully) and closed the gates. She was then able to coax the cat into a smaller pen with the meat she had brought.

It seems that Emma had outsmarted us all for several days, as she realized that just after we had stopped making a racket and left the area, there would be food put out for her in the buffer zone. This meant that she could keep hiding from us and would have a whole 60ha pen to herself and still get fed – smart girl! The trick in the end was that we hadn’t put food down for her before we left, so she went into the buffer zone expecting her meat and couldn’t find any – luckily Kate pitched up in the nick of time.

Anyway, after the whole fiasco, everything is back to normal – the other 11 cats are back in their big enclosure and the wild girls are back together in a small enclosure. Still, no-one will forget our days spent at Bellebeno, wading through long grass with large sticks shouting “Come, come, come, Emma!”.