​With the COVID waves hitting Botswana early in 2021 and during the winter months mid-year, many of our regular CCB activities had to be postponed and several of our staff became ill with COVID. Our regular farmers workshops at our Education Facility had been cancelled for over a year, but with movement restrictions and lockdowns put in place, our staff were unable to even conduct mobile workshops in rural areas in the first half of the year. The team did, however, make up for lost time once the Botswana springtime arrived and within a matter of months, the Farming for Conservation team had managed to conduct 5 mobile workshops, reaching a total of 76 farmers in the rural communities around the Ghanzi District. 
 
Answering the priority needs of these farmers, our team targeted the workshops around those topics that were most needed to achieve positive change in farming in the area. A workshop conducted in the villages around the Ghanzi District in September, focused upon the safe handling and administration of livestock vaccines so as to avoid disease outbreaks within the communal farming areas. In October, the team brought together 35 farmers to one of our model farmer’s farms to run a workshop on how to produce mineral supplement feed blocks to help improve livestock condition during the dry season or in drought years. The FFC team also took members of the Kacgae farming community with them to visit the team from CLAWS Conservancy in the north of Botswana, to learn how they have incorporated unique techniques to help reduce farmer-lion conflict, hoping to inspire them all to help us tackle emerging issues with lions in our target areas. In addition, the team were able to conduct a veterinary clinic for LGDs in the Ghanzi District, working to sterilise and provide vaccinations for 17 LGDs. 
 
Our persistent work with farmers to encourage more sustainable farming practices are critical to conservation efforts for several reasons. Cattle are incredibly prolific in Botswana and when managed poorly, can have huge implications for habitat health via overgrazing and subsequent desertification of the land, as well as disease outbreaks and of course, human-wildlife conflict. In addition, the growing threats from climate change have heightened the already precarious grazing availability in communal farming areas, putting more pressure on rural farmers and therefore the conflict they experience. When farmers are struggling to make their livestock profitable, they have heightened conflict with carnivores, and livestock predation can increase particularly if livestock are underfed, sick or injured. By working towards improving livestock productivity, we can not only reduce conflict through increasing the profitability of small-scale farms, but can reduce the negative impacts that their livestock has on the ecosystem at large. Climate-smart farming practices, also help farmers to become more resilient against shocks, like drought or fires, that are becoming more frequent in the Kalahari.  

​Putting a research collar on a cheetah is no mean feat. Months of monitoring is needed to find the perfect spot to set up a cage trap, which is then set up by placing a halo of devilishly-gnarly blackthorn bushes around a cheetah marking tree with the cage the only point of entry. Researchers involved in this process can be identified by the burning scratches left on their skin, the holes ripped out of their clothes and their tendency to be engaged in picking black thorns out of their skins for weeks afterwards. Once placed, the trap is locked in the open position, so the cheetahs visiting the tree become accustomed to the cage without being scared of it closing them in. After weeks of preparation and with expert timing aligned with visiting veterinarians, the traps are set — ready to catch. This is when the real hard work begins. Considering that day-time temperatures in the Kalahari regularly reach 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), cheetahs cannot be inside the cage traps for more than a few daylight hours at most. Regular checking must be done on each trap so that if a cheetah has been caught, they can be anaesthetised and processed quickly before release. But checking traps in itself is a logistical nightmare. With several traps set at one time (to maximise the chances of capture during the short windows where vets are available), our team of three researchers has to work together with our other field officers to take the hours-long journeys to check each trap regularly. Once we find a cheetah caught, it’s all hands on deck — the veterinarian is mobilised and the team works together to anaesthetise the cat, place the tracking collar on it, take identifying photographs of its spot patterns and record as much morphological and biological data as they can before the anesthetics wear off and the cat is released back into the wild.  
 
Late this year, the research team had five brand new tracking collars arrive from Europe after many months of planning. The collars were to be placed on cheetahs on the western side of Botswana to help uncover what their land-use preferences were, home range patterns and whether or not they were crossing the international border between Botswana and Namibia. But after 23 grueling days of trapping and after countless miles had been driven to check the traps, not one cheetah had been caught. With the vet leaving Ghanzi town, the team had no option but to lock the traps open once again, heavy with disappointment. In October, the vet had returned and they got their second chance. After another 15 days of trapping the research team finally caught a break, with a male cheetah being caught. We promptly named this cheetah Gio, after a 10-year-old boy from The Netherlands who conducted several fundraisers for CCB to raise the money for his tracking collar. It was only nine days later that the team got lucky again, catching, almost unbelievably, a female cheetah at a cheetah marking tree. Female cheetahs very rarely visit cheetah marking trees and this cat was only the second female cheetah that CCB has ever caught for research purposes in 18 years. The information we would get from her tracking collar would be invaluable to our research efforts, and her collaring was a huge emotional boost for the research team, who had worked so hard to make it happen.
 
Weeks later, the research team was enjoying the plentiful data that had been streaming in. With points coming in every five minutes, the research team eagerly updated the rest of the CCB staff about the two cheetahs’ movements across the farmlands. The female cheetah was showing an interesting behaviour of going back and forth to different sites, over and back again over the course of the weeks. Gio had moved an incredible distance since he had been collared and had settled in a lovely area of cheetah habitat, moving between two game farms with plentiful wildlife to feed on. Sadly, late in the evening on Sunday 22nd November the research team received an alert from Gio’s collar that it had stopped moving. The “mortality alert” registers when the collar hasn’t moved for several hours and we knew that this could only be bad news. Mobilising our field team in the dead of night, they travelled for three hours through the bush to his last known location, hoping against all odds that they would find just the collar which may have somehow fallen off, but that Gio was still alright. Sadly, instead they found his body lying amongst the tall grass in the darkness. To say that the research team and the entire CCB team as a whole were devastated by this news is a gross understatement. When you work so hard and put so much into your work, a loss like this can be felt most acutely. The research team in particular, felt this loss extremely hard. CCB’s research coordinator Michelle Kral said the night they lost Gio. “It’s just so hard that you do everything within your power to protect and save them and then this happens under your watch.”  
 
Aside from a wound from scavenging jackals on his hind leg, there was no obvious signs to indicate what had caused Gio’s death. Along with the CCB team, we mobilised the antipoaching staff of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks to investigate the scene the next morning, but with the disturbances caused by scavengers no accurate conclusion could be made, though we were able to rule out poaching or other human-induced causes of death. Lightning strike or snakebite were considered as possibilities, though we will never know for sure. There is some solace in the fact that we could rule out poaching or shooting as the cause for Gio’s death. After so many years of hard work to reduce human-induced cheetah mortalities, the fact that he died of “natural” causes brings us some comfort. Although devastating, the loss of Gio reminds us that cheetahs have it incredibly tough in the wild. Not only are they facing competition from larger carnivores, the daily battle to find enough food and the various natural threats present in the wild Kalahari, but they also face the mounting threat of climate change, the ongoing persecution from farmers and the growing threat of illegal trade which combine to make life for cheetahs fraught with dangers. Losses like this help solidify our resolve that this is why we do what we do. This is why our team works so hard, together with the Department of Wildlife and National Parks and people like Gio who raised the funds, to offer a voice for the voiceless, to push boundaries and to seek solutions to complex problems in the face of endless challenges. Our job is not only to protect cheetahs, but to discover what is happening to them on the ground. And if it weren’t for Gio’s collar, we would have never even known he had died. The knowledge of how cheetahs are dying, even if by natural means, is vitally important for us to continue to protect this important source population of cheetahs. 

​In 2013, our field team in Ghanzi came up with an audacious plan — to train and place livestock guarding dog (LGD) puppies with farmers experiencing conflict with cheetahs. The concept of placing LGDs was not that extraordinary in and of itself, as it had been done before to aid conservation efforts in other African countries. However, the plan that our team had conjured up was unique in two particular ways and built off of our research into LGDs working in Botswana and our observations as to how LGDs worked in the Kalahari. Firstly, rather than breeding or buying specialized, imported breeds of LGDs, we wanted to use local Tswana dogs exclusively. Local dogs had never been used by any LGD placement programme anywhere in the world, however, our research and observations in the field had shown us that they were outstanding guarding dogs and were incredibly resilient to the extreme local climate, disease and parasites. The second unique aspect about this placement programme was that we planned on placing puppies at a later age than other programmes. Placement programmes in South Africa and Namibia would place puppies at 6-8 weeks of age, so that they could imprint on their herd as early as possible, but we decided to place them around 4-6 months instead. This concept was born out of the realization that not many rural farmers had access to veterinary medicine like 5-in-1 or rabies vaccines, which a puppy needs several times in its first few months of life. It was also based upon our research into LGD training, which had indicated that the two most important factors during LGD training that contributed to building a successful LGD was not necessarily for them to be placed at such an early age, but for the puppies to have herders with them during training and for the puppies to learn from already experienced guarding dogs. Seeing as we already had an established demonstration farm with our own successful LGDs, this became our LGD training facility, where we would place rescued unwanted puppies from shelters or rural communities, train them with our herd, give them all of their vaccinations and then place them with farmers all ready to bond with their new herd.  
 
This month, we have reached an incredible milestone with our LGD placement programme — after nine years of placements, this month we placed our 200th LGD! We are thrilled that our latest research, monitoring puppies that we have placed, showed that these little Tswana LGDs have reduced conflict by at least 85% for every farmer that received them. Livestock predation by carnivores has declined dramatically and attitudes towards cheetahs and other carnivores have improved dramatically. And the word has spread beyond our placement programme. Farmers are now sourcing and training their own LGDs, and we are training up our model farmers to become LGD training hubs for the communities at large, helping more and more farmers to protect their livestock from predation and protect themselves against human-wildlife conflict. 
 
CCB’s Jane Horgan reflects back on what this journey means. 
“I was hired by CCB in 2010 with the purpose of building the demonstration farm at CCB’s Western Kalahari field camp in Ghanzi. The 12 goats and LGD “Tau” arrived on my birthday in November 2010 into a freshly minted, brand-new kraal with an untouched farm full of long grass and browse that the goats could enjoy all to themselves. When I started my Masters thesis in 2011, we wanted to find the data that would prove that Tswana dogs were capable and impressive livestock guardians, despite their smaller size. The fact that the data from my research was able to inspire the unique approach of CCB’s LGD placement programme is an incredible source of pride to me. And the team’s unwavering drive to rescue puppies, train them so efficiently and place them with farmers in need brings not only me, but the entire team and incredible amount of joy. It is so satisfying to hear from these farmers that they no longer experience conflict, that they no longer have to worry continually about the safety of their livestock and that, thanks to our LGD programme, their farms have been able to grow and help provide for themselves and their families. And the fact that we’ve been able to provide this peace of mind to over 200 farmers is an incredible achievement and is a tribute to the dedication and commitment of CCB’s team.”  

Each year we celebrate International Cheetah Day by looking back on the year we've had at CCB and taking time to celebrate our achievements. It's hard to fit into a 3-minute video all the passion, determination and teamwork that's needed to make so much progress in a year. But we are thrilled to bring you some highlights from our year at CCB. Happy International Cheetah Day!