Cheetah Conservation Fund

Image via Wikipedia

Cheetah Conservation Fund, their vision – “To see a world in which cheetahs live and flourish in co-existence with people and the environment.” A vision that if we all saw would become a true and lasting reality for our worlds’ most uniquely specialised big cat.

At a time the cheetahs did live and flourish with us and their environment, at the time everything lived and flourished with everything and itself. But with our developing movement we have left those times in the past and with them our respectable treatment and acknowledgment for the cheetah. Developing our own lives, the way we have gone about it, hasn’t been in favour for preserving how they might live. Manipulatively constructing the environment to best suite our needs we are leaving them with a destructive one.

While in our developing world we’ve gone from the ways of the past when we lived to simply to survive the natural world, to surviving to live, to live up to our developing minds and spirits – the way we now think what we’re ‘supposed’ to think and feel or act ‘acceptably’. The cheetah’s, with our aiding ignorance – in time – won’t have a chance for anything. They’re still at one with the natural world and all its glory, it’s their home, aid their way of living and they will survive.

The mind of the cheetah most of us recognise as one of a hunter, a survivor, a sprinter, but to learn and understand further, the spirit of this misconceived killer is one of beauty and freedom. Freedom that is fast becoming trapped and killed – dangerously faster than the cheetah can run. The cheetah is a free and wild born animal, successful in breeding and growing to thrive in the world they almost don’t have left. To be caught, slaughter or bought for captivity, hate, fear or fur isn’t to be a cheetah – free, wild and beautiful.

It is an incredibly distressing truth universally recognized that the cheetah – among its fellow wild cats – are threatened, threatened to the point of extinction, of suffering, of dying out, of not being there to save. But, then again, how acknowledged is this truth? Enough to save them in time?

Because of the minds and spirits the people of CCF have, indefatigably working for the cheetah, our world of endangered wild animals have a chance. The stance of CCF “is that understanding the cheetah’s biology and ecology is essential to stabilise the population and manage its sustainability for the future”. They work to create strategic conservation plans that follow the range of the cheetah, to imply the development of better livestock practices with African farmers to calm their killing out of fear, to conduct programmes that teach and lead villagers and young minds into understanding and supporting a world of conservation, to continue to learn and understand themselves of the cheetah’s genetics, biology and species. Working with and aiding CCF’s stance and means of saving this uniquely magnificent creature will bring us all closer to achieving just that – saving them, instead of leaving it up to these campaigning heroes that work years of long hours to get one step closer only to lose that step when a cheetah is lost to our ignorant guns.

We may think causes like these can wait because there is no court order, no final reminder or last minute deadline we don’t feel the desperate need to give to save, until (for some) we see those incredibly upsetting pictures, pictures that have captured what happens when it is too late, and Yes – we’re to blame – it is us who are leaving it too late.

We survive to learn, so learn that survival is needed here – with the cheetahs’.