Around 12,000 years there was a mass extinction event that eliminated around 75% of the world's large mammals. It's still unclear exactly what caused this but it marked the end for legendary megafauna such as the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger. Remarkably, a handful of cheetahs survived this event, but it created a population bottleneck, resulting in an extreme reduction of their genetic diversity. Today, the average level of genetic variation in cheetahs is less than 4%, lower than the gorillas of Virunga National Park, the Amur tigers and Australia's Tassie devil.

What all of this means is that cheetah conservation is really important and needs to be carefully managed. So in 2018 when a private game reserve in South Africa found three orphaned cheetah cubs calling incessantly for their mother, they made a decision to intervene - a decision to fight for their survival. Typically, orphaned cheetah cubs are removed from the wild and placed in facilities - but Welgevonden wanted to try a new approach - could they keep the cubs in the wild and just help them to bolster their odds of survival?

This episode features Carmen Warmenhove from Welgevonden Game Reserve.

Links

• Welgevonden Game Reserve
• Carmen’s Research Paper