From African savannahs to homes in the Middle East and as far as Oceania, more than 4000 cheetahs were trafficked in the past decade.
“It’s an extremely cruel trade that people don’t often think about,” says Patricia Tricorache, an independent wildlife expert who has worked in cheetah conservation for two decades. She compiled data on the movement of these animals sourced through government documents, field informants, cheetah owners, rescue facilities and media articles.
“There is a trade in skins and bones and other things, but based on the data I collected, the most concerning part is the live cheetah trade from the Horn of Africa, because that’s where populations are extremely low or unknown,” says Tricorache.
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Wild cheetah populations have declined by 90 per cent over the past century, and there are now an estimated 7100 wild cheetahs in the world. Although trafficking has been recognised as a reason why, a lack of data made it easier to ignore, especially among the Gulf states where the cheetahs often end up, says Tricorache.
“The Gulf states are wealthy and the countries that supply the cheetahs are poor, so it’s a big business,” says Tricorache. “In a few hours, they can transport 20 cheetah cubs by boat to Yemen, and in a day or so, they are already in Saudi Arabia being sold.”
Her work shows that most of the trade took place over social media websites like Facebook, and the majority of cheetahs she found were cubs. The findings are peer-reviewed, but Tricorache recognises that there may be shortcomings, especially in missed cases.
“Let’s say I’m off by one thousand or two thousand, more or less. It’s still alarming,” she says. “More than the numbers, it’s the need to do more.”
Some countries have enacted regulation to address cheetah trafficking. The United Arab Emirates, for example, banned the sale and ownership of wild animals in 2016. But Tricorache’s findings suggest that the trade continued unimpeded and only the advertising language changed.
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“Cheetahs are extremely delicate animals,” says Tricorache. She says every cheetah that she and her sources have found in transit while being trafficked “has been touch-and-go: malnourished, bone deformations, intense panic”.
“Even after [cheetah cubs are] sold, people don’t know how to take care of them, so they rarely make it over a year,” she says.
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