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201024Dec16:52

African painted dog and chee­tah all but extinct in Cameroon

Infor­ma­tion
pub­lished 24 Decem­ber 2010 | mod­i­fied 27 July 2010
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The African painted dog (Lycaon pic­tus) and the chee­tah (Aci­nonyx juba­tus) have almost com­pletely dis­ap­peared in Cameroon, accord­ing to researchers from the Uni­ver­sity of Lei­den (Nether­lands) yesterday.

Three years of inten­sive sur­veys, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with researchers from Cameroon, were sum­marised in a news releaseon the University’s website.

The main rea­sons for the col­lapse of the pop­u­la­tion of both painted dog and chee­tah are habi­tat destruc­tion, poach­ing by local com­mu­ni­ties, lack of prey and retal­ia­tory killing by man­agers of hunt­ing zones. Other large car­ni­vores such as lion, leop­ard, striped hyena and spot­ted hyena, have become rare and sur­vive in small populations.

The painted dog as a species is resilient and it is there­fore expected that when wildlife con­ser­va­tion strate­gies are dras­ti­cally improved, it may recover. This is unlikely for the chee­tah pop­u­la­tion to hap­pen, because there are no chee­tah pop­u­la­tions in the neigh­bour­ing coun­tries. The research was funded by the Dutch and Cameroon branches of WWF. (Source: web­site Uni­ver­sity of Lei­den, 26.07.2010)

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Tiger map” (CC BY 2.5) by Sander­son et al., 2006.

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