Cheetah Cubs!

The big news around CCF this weekend is the arrival of four orphan
cheetah cubs. A couple of our staff trapped them two nights ago about
100km south of our farms. Their mother was caught in a fence and
died. Fortunately for the cubs she was wearing a CCF satellite collar
and the farmer whose property she had been living on noticed she was
with cubs not long before her death.

The cubs (3 males, 1 female) are about 3 months old and weigh about
10-12lbs. They arrived this morning and I've spent most of the day
helping with their work-ups, which include vaccinations, blood work
and an IV drip to combat dehydration. They were out on their own for
5 days, but they still had plenty of fight left. An angry baby
cheetah is actually way more intimidating than any of our adult cats.
I've got some decent photos but I was also taking video for the CCF
website so I may need to post the link if any of my clips end up
online. I may also be writing the blog entries for this, I'll post
that as well. One of the males had a huge open laceration on his
chest, so we needed to clean and stitch him up as well. Lots of
not-so-cute pics of that, too.

In other news, I found out that the cubs' nursery is right next to my
desk, so expect plenty of baby pics when I get back! I know you're
excited...

NOTE: I've noticed my latest entries have had some weird
formatting...I'm assuming that's due to gmail. I'm not sure if I can
send it in a different format since I'm working with the most basic
version of email at the moment, but I'll try.