Work for rare cheetah rises above festering nuclear row

5:00AM Friday June 20, 2008
By Fredrik Dahl

Iranian and Western wildlife experts are working together to save rare cheetahs from extinction in Iran's arid, mountainous Kuh-e Bafgh region, despite a nuclear row between their Governments.

United States and British-based conservation groups are backing a campaign spearheaded by Iran's Department of Environment (DoE) and the United Nations Development Programme to prevent the endangered Asiatic cheetah from dying out.

Iran is believed to host the only 60 to 100 Asiatic cheetahs left in the wild. Some eke out a living in a forbidding terrain of jagged peaks, deep gorges and bone-dry plains in the Kuh-e Bafgh protected area in Yazd province in central Iran.

The sleek and spotted cats once roamed between the Arabian peninsula and India, but their number in Iran is estimated to have been halved in the past three decades.

"This is a wonderful case of the urgent conservation needs of the cheetah transcending political differences," said executive director Luke Hunter of Panthera, a non-governmental organisation in New York.

The US, which severed ties with Iran after its 1979 Islamic revolution, is leading efforts to isolate the Middle Eastern country over nuclear work Washington suspects is aimed at making bombs, a charge Tehran denies.

But Hunter, an Australian, said he believed "both Iranians and Americans realise that we cannot afford to allow politics to affect the cheetahs. If we did, we could lose them".

Iranian officials expressed similar views.

"I love anybody who works for conservation and wildlife protection. It doesn't matter who it is," said Ali Akhbar Karimi, a 59-year-old veteran from Iran's DoE in Yazd province.

Until the first half of the 20th century, Iran was home to four of the so-called big cats - including lions and tigers - but now only leopards and cheetahs remain. The Asiatic cheetah is closely related to its better-known African counterpart. In Iran, cheetahs have been pushed close to extinction by rising population pressure and a lack of resources to protect them, with villagers hunting their prey for food and herds of sheep and goat encroaching on their habitats.

"We need to do something urgent to save them," said Iranian biologist Houman Jowkar, field director for the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society in Yazd. "It is a national treasure."

The Kuh-e Bafgh protected area, stretching for 885sq km across a remote part of Yazd, is one of five such pockets of land in Iran where the cheetah still holds out, despite the poaching of gazelles and other prey.

It is hard to believe anything or anybody can thrive in the rocky and bushy landscape. Temperatures soar to about 50C in the summer and plunge below freezing in winter.

Karimi said he had seen several cheetahs this year, including females with cubs, offering hope for the future.

Iran's DoE and the UNDP joined forces to launch the cheetah project in 2001, with the help of US wildlife biologist George Schaller.

His emergency recommendations included increased anti-poaching efforts and the appointment of new game guards. Panthera and the WCS provide funds, expertise and training, while the Zoological Society of London also gives money.

Early last year the WCS introduced a programme to trap up to eight of the cheetahs and fit them with radio-tracking collars to learn more about them.

Adapting to the harsh surroundings, Iran's cheetahs have developed different behaviour from the cheetahs living in greater numbers on the savannahs of Africa. Jowkar said there were signs the Iranian cats were active at night, and they also had thicker fur during winter.

Only two cheetahs have been caught so far and fitted with collars, and one of those was later killed by a leopard in a fight over food. But Jowkar hoped the capture season starting in November would be more successful.

Mehdi Kamyab, a senior UNDP official in Tehran, described the campaign to save the wild cat as a "flagship conservation project" using new techniques and methods.

The initial US$750,000 ($988,726) budget, for which the UNDP was responsible, had been virtually depleted but more would be injected, he said. The WCS and the DoE also provide funding.

"This is just a start, obviously, " Kamyab said. "It is still an endangered species."

Hunter said the scheme had so far been "reasonably successful" as cheetah numbers seemed to have stabilised. He praised the DoE for raising local awareness and increasing penalties for those killing the animals.

"However, there is still a very serious problem with the hunting of the cheetah prey in some areas," he said.

WCS assistant director Peter Zahler said his organisation had encountered no major political or logistical problems.

"Our donors, partners and both [US and Iranian] Governments recognise that endangered wildlife cannot always wait for political solutions and that wildlife conservation is itself not a political activity."

TOP CAT
* Iran has the only Asiatic cheetahs in the wild.
* The animal used to live in the Arabian peninsula and India.
* There are between 60 and 100 left.
* It is the fastest land animal, racing to 110km/h in short bursts.

- REUTERS