Gazette: Saving cheetahs
Endangered animal finds support through local couple’s Cheetah Foundation
By Kate Jonuska
From an office in Sedalia, Colorado, Bobby and Renee Hartslief buy and restore historic buildings, raise their two children, and attempt to save an entire species of animal quickly disappearing from the wild: the cheetah.
As surprising as it may be for the Pikes Peak region to have so direct a link to the world’s fastest mammal, whose range stretches from Africa through the Indian subcontinent, it was just as unexpected of a career choice for the couple.
“My wife Renee was born in Norman, Okla. We met in South Africa, married and moved to a bankrupt dairy farm,” explains Bobby Hartslief. Renee was running a multi-racial Montessori preschool on the property when Bobby attended an animal auction in a nearby town and found himself thinking, “It would be so cool to have these kids see the indigenous animals. So I bought our first animal, a giraffe, who was actually named First.”
Dozens of other species of animals came second, and the bankrupt dairy farm was soon a 4,000-acre game preserve called the Savannah Africa with 25 species of animals — including the cheetah, which seemed fitting considering it’s the animal mascot of the Free State province of South Africa, where the preserve is located.
“It was a natural thing that we got into cheetah,” says Hartslief, who started breeding the animals for captivity in 2001, sending them as far as Toronto, Miami and Tokyo. But he quickly learned that such methods were not truly aiding the animal, whose beauty and personality had stolen their hearts.
“You start with very pure intentions,” he explains. “But then when you actually see this animal you brought into the world sitting in a cage, you start thinking, ‘Hang on. Are we really, seriously helping this animal?’”
And thus the Cheetah Foundation, dedicated to maintaining and increasing the population of cheetah in the wild, was born.
CLICK HERE to read the full text of this article, which published in the June 14, 2009 Gazette newspaper.
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