As Cathryn Hilker plays with her friend Maya in the recreation area for big cats at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, one can't help but notice the similarities.
The woman and the cheetah share an innate grace and beauty. They are so comfortable within their angular, raw-boned bodies that their movements appear as effortless as breathing. Their trust, too, is complete.It is no wonder that the cheetah has so deeply touched Cathryn Hosea Hilker, coordinator and head trainer of the Cincinnati Zoo's Cat Ambassador Program. And it is no wonder that Hilker is now playing a major role in saving the cheetah from extinction.
Far from the fenced-in recreation area at the zoo, Hilker has worked to establish a much larger playground. Two years ago in Namibia, in Southwest Africa, 24 rough, dusty miles from the nearest town, an 18,000-acre farm was purchased with a grant to the zoo's Angel Fund (a cheetah preservation fund) from Hilker's husband, Carl Hilker Jr.
The farm, known in Namibia as Elandsvreugde, is serving as an International Cheetah Research and Education Center and a permanent base of operations for the Cheetah Conservation Fund. Namibia, and neighboring Botswana, have the largest populations of the 10,000 cheetahs left on earth.
Then, three months ago, the Hilkers quietly purchased an additional 10,000 acres contiguous to Elandsvreugde. The acreage contains the only permanent water hole in the immediate area and one that is vital to the cheetahs' migration routes.
The farm already has had an impact, Cathryn Hilker says. "This is not a fenced farm where we're keeping cheetah," she explains. "In fact, we cut fences down. The whole point is to keep it open so the animals can migrate.
"You don't buy habitat and put a fence around it. You buy habitat and open it up. Right as we speak, a mother (cheetah) and three babies have taken up temporary residence there, in a 5,000-acre open field."
But supporting a cheetah, Hilker says, takes more than 28,000 acres. So the farm is but one piece of a larger tapestry, a growing conservancy of "cheetah-friendly farmers" now spanning 350,000 acres.
In the past, Namibian farmers have preferred shooting cheetahs to befriending them for a simple reason: The cheetahs were a threat to the farmers' sheep and goats.
So cheetah preservationists, including Laurie Marker-Kraus of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, have helped solve the problem by giving farmers guard dogs and trained herders. The dogs, Anatolian shepherds, originally were bred in Turkey to protect flocks of sheep from wolves. They do not make good pets, Hilker says, but they will fight to the death to protect their flock.
Hilker has loved cats and other animals since she was a child growing up on a farm in Mason, Ohio. (She now lives on a different farm in Mason.) The youngest and only girl among four children, she flourished amid the farm's rigorous, open-air environment.
When her family took her to the Cincinnati Zoo, she made a beeline for the cheetah exhibit.
Why she loved the cheetahs, she can't exactly say, but she figures it must have been their walk: a lanky walk on matchstick legs with shoulders moving up and down.
"I still watch the cheetahs all day," she says. "I really haven't changed." After college Hilker taught school, began volunteering at the Zoo, made her first trip to Africa on a humanitarian mission and drove across the continent on a journey that was, in retrospect, "incredibly dangerous." She would return to Africa 11 times.
At 38, Cathryn Hilker married Carl, a pilot. They had their only child a year later, and for several years Hilker devoted herself to little Carl.
Then in 1981, Hilker took in a second "child," a baby cheetah named Angel.
Mrs. Hilker is visibly moved when recalling Angel. "I raised her along with my son. . . . She was one of those animals you see once in a lifetime.."