CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
In remote parts of Iran, Asiatic cheetahs cling precariously to survival. Two years ago, the scientists working to protect them were accused of spying and imprisoned, leaving the cats in even greater danger of extinction.
In 2009, a team of Iranian research scientists with a special interest in large carnivores started work on a camera-trapping study in Kavir National Park, a protected area spanning 4,000km2 a couple of hours south of Tehran. Regarded as one of the country’s most important wildlife reserves, its herds of native gazelles and wild sheep, which are preyed on by packs of wolves and solitary leopards, have given it the nickname of Iran’s Serengeti.
The scientists weren’t interested in these big beasts, however – they were looking for the presence of a speed merchant more usually associated with the real Serengeti. They hoped that their work would reveal Kavir to be an important stronghold for the Asiatic cheetah, a subspecies that must surely count, along with Eastern Russia’s Amur leopard, as the world’s most endangered predator.
They were severely disappointed. Their efforts detected just one male in the park, and there has been no record of him since 2013. “I guess this was my first close encounter with extinction,” one of the team, Ehsan Moqanaki, tells BBC Wildlife.
Since then, things have not improved for the Asiatic cheetah. Once distributed right across the Middle East, as far north as Kazakhstan and across to India, it largely vanished during the 20th century and is now entirely restricted to Iran, with a population usually estimated at around just 50 individuals. This is an animal that is right on the brink, and it has been grimly hanging on for at least 40 or 50 years.
Long-distance cats
Once upon a time, Iran’s cheetahs would have carved out a good living on the goitered gazelles and chinkaras that thrived on its barren lowland plains (though never in the density you find their relatives on the lush African savannahs). Iran’s lowlands are arid semi-deserts supporting much lower populations of herbivores and, consequently, predators.
As a result, Iran’s cheetahs have enormous home ranges. One male, known as M5, was snapped at camera-traps positioned more than 200km apart over the course of five years, and a paper published by Dr Mohammad Farhadinia, of the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), and other scientists, estimated the total territory it covered to be a staggering 9,500km2. That’s one cheetah with very itchy feet.
Even cheetahs in Namibia, which live in a comparably dry and semi-desert habitat, have home ranges of no more than 3,000km2, while elsewhere in Africa,
This is an animal right on the brink, and it has been grimly hanging on for at least 40 or 50 years.
territories of little more than 100km2 are not unusual.
The cheetahs’ scarcity, coupled with the huge territories they occupy, means the word elusive barely begins to describe them. Moqanaki has never seen one. “Out of about 10 researchers with several years experience of working in cheetah habitats, only two have ever seen them in the wild,” he says. Iranian cheetahs also look very different to their African cousins. They are smaller, skinnier and furrier – the latter an adaptation that enables them to cope with freezing winter temperatures. Iran is probably the only place in the world where cheetahs can be seen amid snow. The renowned field scientist George Schaller once described them as “very pale animals in a pale habitat – almost like a vision,” and said they had a fuzzy look and even “a little mane”.
Trials and tribulations
While they had never been numerous, everything changed for Iran’s cheetahs after the country’s protected area system collapsed following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, according to Dr Luke Hunter, a big-cat expert with the Wildlife Conservation Society. The subsequent eight-year war with Iraq didn’t help, either. “After the Shah was toppled, there was widespread hunting of gazelles using jeeps and motorbikes,” Hunter says. “It’s really easy to do.”
With the loss of their usual prey, cheetahs were forced to retreat to more mountainous areas where wild sheep (urials) and Persian ibex still persist, a habitat unlike any other where the species is found. The ground, says Hunter, is frequently steep and uneven, littered with boulders as big as basketballs – not the sort of terrain on which you really want to push your fragile frame up to speeds of 100kph.
Nobody knows exactly how they hunt here, but the chances are it’s a more leopard-like, tactical ambush than a flat-out sprint. “With the Iranian Department of Environment, we collared two cheetahs at the end of 2007,” recalls Hunter, “and they took down an ibex on just this sort of terrain. They were probably feeding on the carcass when a leopard showed up and killed one of the cheetahs. It shows just what a knife-edge they are living on.”
The absence of their natural prey is not the only issue facing Asiatic cheetahs. Roads criss-cross much of their habitat, and individuals are killed by vehicles on a regular basis – at least 15 known victims between 2001 and 2017. Dogs owned by herders (to guard livestock), and even direct persecution by the herders themselves, are also a threat. There may be only two areas left with viable populations – Touran National Park and Miandasht Wildlife Refuge, close to each other in north-east Iran – but nobody really knows for sure.
“There is a lot of controversy over how many cheetahs are left and how to save them,” says Tanya Rosen, a big-cat scientist who became involved with Asiatic cheetah
Nobody knows how they hunt here, but chances are it’s more tactical ambush than flat-out sprint.
conservation after sharing information and experiences of mitigating human-carnivore conflict and setting up community-based conservancies with Iranian colleagues.
“Some say there are fewer than 20 left and the only way to save them is through captive breeding. Others argue that since most of the camera-trapping has been done in the protected areas, we are missing information from outside them that could provide a fuller picture.”
Accusations of espionage
However, what has hugely exacerbated the plight of Iran’s cheetahs is something wholly unconnected to the conservation of the cats themselves. At the start of 2018, nine conservationists from the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation (PWHF) were arrested over allegations that they had been using camera-traps to spy on military installations.
One of them, Kavous Seyed Emami, who ran the foundation, died in jail soon after his arrest. The authorities said he killed himself, a claim disputed by his family. In November 2019, after nearly two years in jail, six of the eight surviving conservationists were convicted of “contacts with the US enemy state” and given prison sentences of between 6 and 10 years. This is despite there being “no strong evidence to prove the
accusations” against them, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) said in a statement.
Notwithstanding the tragic impact on the scientists – seven men and two women – and their families, their ongoing detention will also have far-reaching consequences for cheetah conservation. “The accusation of espionage has affected every single person who has been involved in cheetah conservation in Iran,” says Moqanaki. Indeed, as far as he is aware, it has essentially shut down all camera-trapping of the species for the past two years.
Some of the jailed scientists were pivotal figures in the battle to protect cheetahs. Houman Jowkar was the manager of the Conservation of the Asiatic Cheetah Project (CACP) – a UN-funded programme run by Iran’s Department of Environment – while Amir Hossein Khaleghi Hamidi was leading efforts to relocate livestock herders out of Touran National Park.
The conservation community has rallied to their support. A small group (which included Rosen) co-ordinated the writing of a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader – its religious head, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The letter, which pleaded the case for their innocence and urged the Ayatollah to ensure full evaluation of the evidence against them and a fair trial, was signed by 370 of the world’s leading conservationists and researchers.
Believed innocent
So why were they arrested? No one BBC Wildlife spoke to for this article believes they were spies. “Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t spy on military installations with camera-traps,” says Frans Lanting, the Dutch wildlife photographer who visited Iran in 2011 and 2012.
There appear to be two main theories. The first is that the scientists are the victims of increasing hostility between Iran and the USA. The PWHF worked with the bigcat conservation group Panthera, sharing information and receiving some equipment. Panthera’s co-founder, the philanthropist Thomas Kaplan, is also a prominent funder of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and spoke at a summit just a few months before the scientists’ arrest.
The PWHF was so concerned by Kaplan’s lobbying against Iran’s nuclear activities that it wrote a letter to Panthera in October 2017, describing his statements as “insulting to our country and its people” and questioning whether relations between the two organisations could continue.
Another explanation for the persecution of the scientists stems from Iran’s complicated internal politics rather than its turbulent relationship with the USA. According to the CHRI, the PWHF had been resisting efforts by Iran’s hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (the IRGC – commonly referred to as the Revolutionary Guard) to place missile silos in protected areas.
The accusation of espionage has essentially shut down all camera-trapping.
CHRI quotes a news story from the opposition-run news site Kalame. “The conflict between the two sides went on for years and eventually the IRGC’s intelligence organisation used espionage as an excuse to arrest the environmentalists so that it could continue its activities in the protected regions without any problem,” the report said.
“These people’s lives will be changed forever,” says the CHRI’s director of communications Jasmin Ramsey. “The question is really how long they will be forced to stay in prison. Others will see what’s happened to them and be afraid, and worry they will be targets. It has a terrible effect.”
A matter of pride
Rosen, who is certain the link to Kaplan was the cause of the crisis and left her role with Panthera as a result, says she hopes that once the case is resolved, the imprisoned conservationists can go back to work. “For people like Taher [Ghadirian, who has worked on human-carnivore conflict reduction in southern Iran] and Amir Hossein [who has worked with livestock herders in Touran National Park], not to be able to return to what they were doing would be like death. Their work is their life.”
If this story makes you think the government of Iran cannot be committed to saving the Asiatic cheetah, think again. There is strong state support for cheetah conservation, with the Department of Environment previously backing the efforts of NGOs such as the PWHF. At the 2014 World Cup, the Iranian national football team wore shirts emblazoned with a large image of a cheetah – giving the species some much-needed publicity.
People all over the country care deeply about the cheetah, says Luke Hunter. He recalls buying supplies in a small-town general store on his first trip to Iran. “There was a poster of a cheetah behind the counter,” he says. “It was a picture of a captive animal from Tehran Zoo that had become famous as part of a national education campaign. The shopkeeper knew all about it, and he was also aware that he lived in an area where Asiatic cheetahs were found, and he was proud of that.”
For his part, Moqanaki says he does not believe anyone in Iran wants to see the cheetah disappear, and believes that the cat can still be saved through organised international endeavour – if action is taken immediately. Lanting, though, is less optimistic. “Condemning the very people who can make a difference may well have the effect of sentencing Iran’s cheetahs to extinction.”
JAMES FAIR writes about wildlife, conservation and the environment. Jamesfairwildlife.co.uk
FRANS LANTING is a conservation and wildlife photographer. See more of his work at lanting.com
“Not to be able to return to what they were doing would be like death. Their work is their life.”