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"A bushman story says that
one day God held a race between the tsessebe and the cheetah. Tsessebe
(like other hartebeest family members) was very fast. Cheetah fearing
for his soft paws borrowed some shoes from a wild dog. The race started
and tsessebe easily took the lead, but just when it looked a certain
result tsessebe fell. Being a generous fellow cheetah stopped to help tsessebe up. God was so impressed by this that he made cheetah the
fastest animal, and let him keep the wild dog’s paws. To this day
cheetahs have claws just like dogs i.e. they cannot be retracted back
into their paw like other cats, and of course they are still the
fastest."
"Cheetahs are big in
Namibia. The biggest population in the world is here. Curiously they
tend to be found on farms rather than in reserves. The centre of the
country is their stronghold. All in all this makes cheetahs rather
difficult to see. They live in public places like Etosha but at pretty
low densities. The belief is that in Etosha they have to compete with
bigger predators like lions and hyenas that steal the cheetah’s kills,
and also kill their cubs. Legend has it that the cheetah’s tears (black
lines running down from their eyes) are because they loose so many cubs.
The larger predators like lions are not present on farms. The cheetah’s
prey like kudu and springbok are also relatively common on farms. So the
cheetahs have a much better life on the farms than in the protected
parks. The exception to this seems to have been the reserve round Hardap
Dam in the south. The cheetahs here did so well that the game came under
intense pressure from them and the cheetahs had to be removed. Of course
there were no lions to compete with them at Hardap." |
