The Race to Save Big Cats | National Geographic

Cheetah are in a race for survival. There are maybe just 7,000 adult cheetah left in the wild. I've covered the illegal trafficking networks draining the Horn of Africa of their cheetah. They also face massive habitat loss and retaliatory killings by herders when cats prey on their livestock. I want to find out what's being done to try and rescue cheetah from the brink.

How do captive breeding programs like this help to grow wild populations of cheetah? It essentially boils down to genetics. There is a lack of diversity in the current wild populations that we have, and we need to put healthy genetics back into it. Part of the phased 're-wilding' is that we're starting to disassociate normal captive settings around them.

When I open up that crate and a cat gets released into a reserve, it gives me goosebumps every single time. One of our initial cats that we re-wilded, her name was Khatu. She's one of our success stories, and she's currently on her third litter already in the wild. I think she's around, but I will use my telemetry to track her.

Yeah. So you have a collar on her?

She has a collar, yes. She's here, with a kill.

Oh wow I see her! So the cubs they run away. It's really rare for the cheetah to get six cubs, but this one, she does this for the second time now. Cheetah like Khatu and her cubs could be the key to ensuring that the fastest land animal on earth isn't consigned to history. But it must happen alongside efforts to stop trafficking, habitat loss, and poaching.

Around the world, big cats like lions and tigers continue to be traded and kept captive in inhumane conditions, but they can be rescued and moved to properly managed wildlife sanctuaries. That can mean a journey of thousands of miles.

I've just been a great animal lover my whole life. When you're talking about Eastern Europe, there are no facilities, there are no sanctuaries there for big cats. So we've got to bring them out. I met someone, and I moved over to Ukraine to be with them. And that is when I got involved in the rescue and relocation of abused wildlife.

We knew we needed to get these cats out. I got on the phone, and I called DHL, and within days they had made a decision that they could do this. So in total, the cats spent 87 hours in those travel crates. The one cat Khaya, she's been locked in a garage size for three years. Concrete and steel. She's never been anywhere else.

And to open that door, she doesn't know that she can step across that threshold. You'll be surprised how quickly they adapt and they'll just be taken care of and loved in the way that we can love them, and let them just be lions.