World cheetah population is about 6% of what it was in 1900

Anyone who writes about cats has an obligation to remind readers that the world population of the cheetah has declined catastrophically since the 1900s when there were an estimated 100,000 on the planet while today there are an estimated 6500. The population is severely fragmented and it is decreasing year-on-year. Nothing has changed.

A scientific study published in 2016 concluded that there were “dramatic declines of cheetah across its distribution range.”

That study estimated the world population at about 7,000 individuals because it was around seven years ago so you can see the estimate has dropped since then which is unsurprising. And these will be estimates, which can be inflated. Counting wild cat species accurately is tricky.

Critically, the study scientists concluded that the cheetah was “confined to 9% of its historical distributional range. However, the majority of the current range (77%) occurs outside of protected areas where the species faces multiple threats.”

That is an astonishing statistic. What they’re saying, just to reiterate, is that more than three quarters of the cheetah population of the world is living outside of nature reserves where they are protected. They are living perhaps on farmland where they can be persecuted because they hunt livestock.

RELATED: Cheetahs become more nocturnal and less active in high temperatures which may have negative survival consequences

We have to be sensitive to Africa’s farmers because they have to make a living. It is all very well for Westerners to say that Africa should protect and conserve all iconic species, effectively making the African continent a nature reserve, while Africans have to live with them and these are big species that can harm them physically and financially. And that’s the problem. Although it should be noted that in the case of the cheetah, we are talking about a retiring large cat that attacks livestock but rarely people.

Within the reserves there appears to be a cheetah population growth because they are protected while outside the reserves in unprotected areas the population declines.

And research indicates that growth rates within protected areas have to be high if they are to compensate for declines outside.

Remarkably, the study says that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List had classified the cheetah as endangered in 2016 but my research now indicates that they are considered to be vulnerable which is one step up i.e. less endangered which I find absolutely astounding.

I have very little confidence in the people who run the Red List. To me, they consistently undervalue endangered species and tend to be reluctant to classify them as truly endangered. I always wonder whether they are lobbied incessantly by both African administrators and the hunting lobby in America and the UK. Both these parties want iconic species to be unprotected and therefore not endangered so they can sell licences to sport hunters at exorbitant prices.

The study concluded that there should be a holistic approach to conservation “that incentivises protection and promotes sustainable human-wildlife coexistence across large multiple-use landscapes.”

What they are saying is that there needs to be better processes in place which allows farmers to coexist with cheetahs. The classic way to achieve that is to compensate farmers for livestock loss through government funding as a kind of insurance policy to prevent farmers from retaliatory killings of cheetah.

Study: The global decline of cheetah Acinonyx jubatus and what it means for conservation. Link: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1611122114

RELATED: When Namibian farmers avoided cheetah ‘hubs’ they reduced livestock losses by 86%

Some tags: