It almost seems like any hick in Africa with a farm and knack for catching animals can start a tourist attraction. We spent a night on a small sheep and cattle farm that kept a few cheetahs for housecats and then another 30-some wild cats on a private reserve. After playing with the ‘house cats’, we went into the wild cat enclosure and watched a feeding frenzy from the back of a pickup truck. Wow.

From the sounds of it, Namibia is doing all it can to single handedly exterminate the cheetah. It is apparently common in the farmlands for hungry cheetahs to attack livestock and find themselves on the wrong end of a farmer’s shotgun. The family at cheetah park had been paying farmers to allow them to come in and trap these nuisance cheetahs. But now, the Namibian government has apparently made that illegal. And they’ve made breeding or selling them to zoos or parks illegal. It is actually possible that there is a sane reason behind all this, but in the meantime, the number of cheetahs in Namibia is dropping to extinction.