Cheetah cub becoming ambassador for his species
Life didn’t start out easy for Tavi, but someday the 10-week-old cheetah cub could become a credit to his species.
Tavi arrived three weeks ago at Wild Wonders, a 5-acre wildlife education and conservation center in the hills of Bonsall in San Diego County. Because of its many years of work raising money and awareness for cheetah conservation programs in Africa, Wild Wonders was selected to raise the rambunctious cub.
After several months of training, Tavi will join the center’s two other cheetahs, Masika and Hasani, as an animal ambassador, taking part in education programs to teach the public about the dangers facing these big cats. Tavi will replace Victor, a 14-yearold cheetah who died of bone cancer last November.
Today there are only about 6,900 cheetahs left in the wild. Their population has been decimated by farmers who shoot and trap the wild cats because they kill off livestock. There’s also a thriving pet trade where smugglers capture young cheetahs and sell them as luxury pets to Middle Eastern millionaires, though the vast majority of them die, either in transit or from malnutrition and improper care, said Jackie Navarro, Wild Wonders’ executive director.
Tavi is the youngest cheetah Navarro’s 30-yearold organization has ever taken in. To help ensure he has the proper care, she is bringing in two cheetah experts who will work with him onsite for the next few months. Cheetahs rarely breed in captivity and abandoned or orphaned cubs often die.
In order for Tavi to thrive, he needs constant interaction with handlers for roughly 30 minutes of every waking hour. That’s intensive work for Wild Wonders’ eight-member staff, who also care for the ranch’s more than 100 other rescued and donated animals. In years past, Wild Wonders supported itself mainly with onsite education programs at schools, libraries, birthday parties and special events. That income has been lost since the pandemic began. Now the ranch survives on donations, onsite tours and the much-needed help of interns and volunteers.
Tavi’s daily schedule includes lessons in how to roughhouse with toys but not people, running exercises, learning to wear a harness, walk on a leash and sit on command and other tasks needed for education programs where the public can look but not touch the cheetahs. Because Tavi has no sibling companions, he has been partnered with Yara, an 11-week-old female yellow Labrador puppy who was donated by a local breeder a few weeks ago.
On Tuesday afternoon, Tavi darted around a caged enclosure, making repeated sneak attacks on stuffed animals and squeaky toys in Navarro’s hands. Yara sat outside the cage watching and playing on her own. For now, their interactions are limited to ensure they play nice and bond safely. Tavi weighs about nine pounds and is growing fast. He’s slim and a bit gangly in his movements, with a stripe of mohawk-like fur running down his spine called a mantle, which in the wild serves as cub camouflage among the spiky grasslands in Africa.
Tavi, which means “good” in Aramaic, is a “singleton.” He was one of three cubs born to a captive-bred cheetah. After his two siblings died, Tavi’s mother stopped nursing him and might have killed him if he wasn’t removed from her enclosure. In the wild, mother cheetahs will reject or kill singletons so they can return to estrus and have another litter with the hope that more cubs survive to adulthood.