IN ANIMALS ON 12TH SEP 2020

Cheetah Cubs Born Summer 2020 Named

The cubs, one male and two females were born on 10th June and have delightling visitors to the wildlife park, enjoying the mild weather playing together in the grass and on the logs of their habitat – in an area known as Cheetah Hill in Fota.

Fota Wildlife Park rangers have picked names suggested by the public for three Northern cheetah cubs (Acinonyx j. soemmeringii) born to mother Nimpy and father Sam this summer. The cubs, one male and two females were born on 10th June and have delightling visitors to the wildlife park, enjoying the mild weather playing together in the grass and on the logs of their habitat – in an area known as Cheetah Hill in Fota.

The name chosen for the male cub is Robin, by Victor Levingstone from Dublin and for the two females cubs, Olivia, suggested by Niamh & Aoife Butler from Fermoy and Florence suggested by Dylan Paul from Ballycotton.

The cubs’ mother Nimpy is 10 years old and was born in Parc Zoologique de La Palmyre, France and the father Sam is four years old and was born in Wadi Al Safa Wildlife Centre, Dubai, UAE. Sam arrived in Fota in 2017 and has had two other litters of cubs this year. Nimpy and Sam are part of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria Northern cheetah breeding programme which is coordinated by Fota Wildlife Park.

The birth of these cubs brings the total for this endangered species born in Fota to 204. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has classified the subspecies status for the Northern cheetah as endangered. A 2017 expert report on the decline of the cheetah suggested that in the natural range of the species, there were fewer than 2,800 left in the wild in the whole of East and North Africa. The Asiatic cheetah is critically endangered in Iran with less than 40 animals left in the wild.