CCF hosts international predator management course

DURING February, the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) hosted 21 conservationists and agriculturalists from four southern African cheetah-range countries for an international training course on Integrated Livestock, Wildlife and Predator Management.

The course focused on cheetah-human conflict, and the role of farmer outreach programmes and community-based training to mitigate conflict. This course was supported by the Howard G Buffett Foundation in co-operation with the African Cheetah Initiative’s Cheetah Regional Strategic Planning partners. Participants came from Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique and Namibia for the training, which helped build capacity to conserve cheetahs and their ecosystems by working with communities and other stakeholders to apply techniques for mitigating human-wildlife conflict. ‘With cheetah populations dwindling, their survival depends on educated people using proven methods to reverse this trend. Over the past 20 years, CCF and other organisations have developed many such methods and for the past few years have been sharing this information through training for wildlife conservation and agriculture professionals,’ CCF Executive Director Dr Laurie Marker told participants.CCF staff was assisted with lectures and exercises by a number of conservation and agricultural advocates. Wiebke Volkmann, from Earth Wise Enterprise, taught on integrated and holistic management practices. Topics included the advantages of grouping community livestock herds together and improving the productivity of grazing lands through reduced impact on the land, increasing ground cover and reducing erosion and water runoff. Other course presenters were Dr Donald Hlahla, from the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, who facilitated a workshop on leadership skills, and Dr Peter Lindsey, a conservancy consultant, who presented the IUCN’s adopted Southern African Regional Strategy on Cheetahs and Wild Dogs. In addition, Chris Weaver of WWF presented on large-scale land use planning using Namibia’s Communal Conservancy Programme as a model for community-based resource management. CCF will be hosting another International Integrated Livestock and Predator Management course in March. From June 3 to 30, a Cheetah Conservation Biology Field Training course will run, which is aimed at providing conservation training for international cheetah conservation biologists.