Saving a Cat That Calls the Iranian Desert Its Home

By Dulcie Leimbach

While the Security Council strategies to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, the United Nations has also been trying to solve another threat within that vast, complicated country: the life of the Asiatic cheetah, the fastest land mammal on earth.

The Asiatic cheetah is a critically endangered member of the cat family that is now relegated to the central plateau of Iran. Its near extinction happened through habitat degradation and disturbance and diminished prey- primarily gazelles. The cheetah once roamed the Middle East and Central Asia up to Kazakhstan, but at its lowest point, a few decades ago, its numbers hit a mere 50 cats subsisting in the rocky, desert-like terrain in the middle of Iran.

More recently, that number may be as high as 100 and relatively stabilized, thanks to the Conservation of the Asiatic Cheetah Project, a partnership between the UN Development Program and Iran's Department of the Environment. The Global Environment Facility, a group of 181 countries, international institutions, nongovernmental organizations and private entities that supports improvements to the environment, provided $725,000 for the first phase of the project. The Iranian government contributed up to $800,000 in-kind donations.

The UN Development Program and other UN agencies participate in the cheetah project through the Millennium Development Goals and its environmental sustainability component. Other parties that have been involved include the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Cheetah Conservation Fund.

The Asiatic cats live in remote areas in a big region, so it's hard to quantify their actual total, said Luke Hunter, executive director of Panthera, a wild-cat conservation group in New York that is also partnering in the venture. Hunter travels to Iran about once a year for research on the cheetah.

The animal took a turn for the worse after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when conservation work fell by the wayside, and wildlife in general and cheetahs in particular became ever more vulnerable to hunters, who went after the cats for sport and profit as well as to keep them from devouring farmers livestock.

Although the more recent governments of Iran and those saving the animal have staved off the animal's full demise through the creation of national parks and wildlife refuges, the cheetah still confronts a long stretch to revitalization, with the major threats being illegal hunting, overgrazing of its habitat by livestock and significant depletion of its wild prey.

"There's lots of human impact in the parks" on the cheetah, Hunter said in an interview with UNA-USA. Cheetah prey continues to be hunted illegally for meat, which is sold on the black market, a crime that the government has curtailed to some success. The government has also been buying back private land to protect crucial grazing sites for the cheetahs - prey, particularly areas with water holes, but that quest is expensive. The bigger challenge is maintaining a large stock of gazelles for the cheetah to thrive on, but gazelles have been hunted to near death, too.

And cheetah sometimes end up as road kill, roaming at night onto the major highways intersecting its territory.

An Invitation to Run

Despite these threats, this arid region is ideal for the athletic cheetah, where the wide-open spaces offer tracks for the animal's famous 60-mile-an-hour dashes - the last species of a lineage of cats built for such chases. Like a greyhound, it is blessed with long, lean legs, a super-size chest and a waspy waist, as Hunter described the cat's physique. Its body extends up to two and a half feet long, not including the tail, which acts as a rudder to stabilize the animal when it makes its swift turns toward prey. Besides gazelles, the Asiatic cheetah dines on ibex and urials, killing prey by attacking its throat to suffocate it.

"The cheetahs subsist O.K., but both species of prey - the ibex and urial - are mountain dwellers," Hunter says. This terrain makes it challenging for the cat to use its high-speed hunting techniques. When the prey moves down the slopes for water or new grass in the valleys, the cheetah seizes the moment.

With a coarse, tawny black-spotted coat, it is not quite as gorgeous and silky as a leopard, yet it carries itself regally. As a symbol of elegance and fleet on its feet, the cat was captured in Asian art for centuries. Maharajas trained them to hunt for gazelles, earning the name "hunting leopard."

The Cat Project's Successes

The first phase of the cheetah project, from 2001 to 2008, analyzed the causes undoing the population and made headway in addressing the most serious threats. Preservation sites were upgraded from "prohibited hunting" areas to wildlife refuges and national parks, providing more protection. Project game guards and the government's own protection force helped secure these regions for the cheetahs and reduce poaching of its prey; fines for cheetah kills are also high. A public-awareness campaign, complete with posters in Farsi, to save the cat helped enlighten Iranians, especially those living in the region where the animal exists.

Indeed, interest in the cat has risen among Iranian researchers, with reports in journals published and a project Web site (cheetah.irandoe.org) publicizing the cheetah's status. Iran has even instituted an Asiatic cheetah day, Aug. 31, when educational programs and festivals are held mainly around the cheetah habitat.

"Very few experts have been needed to be brought in from the outside," said B. Murali, a program specialist for the South and West Asia division at the UN Development Program in New York. "The people in Iran working on this are highly qualified and competent."

Such awareness efforts, however, do not always work. In 2008, a local herder chased a young cheetah and chained it at home but eventually turned it over to the conservationists. Since then, the cub has been living in a large natural enclosure in Miandasht Wildlife Refuge, a 210,000-acre area considered an important cheetah habitat. The cat, called Koshki, will most likely not be released to the wild because of its poor survival skills, but its close monitoring should provide more information on this relatively obscure animal, whose counterpart in Africa has been researched much further.

Little is known, for starters, about the Asiatic cheetah's ecology, movement patterns, habitat requirements and biology, though Hunter said that in an optimal environment, the cat could breed up to 8 cubs a litter every 18 months. As a shy animal, it steadfastly avoids human contact.

With the project's approximately $2 million second phase going since January 2009, research will continue on the cheetah through more extensive tagging using collared satellite devices. The goal is to learn such basic information as ranging patterns, habitat preferences and community dynamics. This phase, to last through 2012 and cover a large physical range, will add more guards in national parks and preserves, reinforcing the value of engaging villagers in protecting the cats from illegal hunting and overgrazing.

Big-cat conservation and monitoring, nevertheless, is often a process entailing two to three decades, so the second phase is an "incremental step" that will provide a "blueprint for a fine-tuned approach" to saving the animal, said Mehdi Kamyab, the team leader for the Energy, Environment and Disaster Management Program cluster at the UN Development Program in Tehran.

As Hunter said, saving the Asiatic cheetah is "important for its own sake."

"It's a fantastic animal," he added. "It's been part of the Persian culture for 2,000 years and deserves to be so for 2,000 more."

Dulcie Leimbach is the publications director of UNA-USA.