Written by Victoria Yu - ACK Volunteer

Since 2006, CCFK has been working on a three-year community development project in Kiu, a region in the Machakos Wildlife Forum where we conduct field work. Our plan was to improve local livestock dips, some of which were almost a hundred years old. (A livestock dip immerses cattle in a bath of acaricide—short-acting chemicals that repel ticks and tse-tse flies for up to a week, thus preventing tick born diseases. Not only does this allow ranchers to hone husbandry skills and profit from healthier cattle; it helps us estimate how much livestock is lost just from predation, and not from causes like disease.)

We renovated four dips in 2006, and by December they were ready to go. Local cattle herders elected committees to manage them, and so far we've seen greater productivity in milk and meat and less deaths by tick-borne diseases.

This project is possible through sponsorship from Cheetah Friends Europe (Netherlands), NK Brothers (Kenya), Unga Feeds (Kenya), Rudy Neilson and Peter Barber (Canada), and the Kenyan government. The project funds part of the costs of acaricide, and we arrange regular workshops on dip management, community participation, and bookkeeping and accountability, so that these dips can become self-sustainable by the end 2009.

Action for Cheetahs in Kenya needs your help. To make a donation, please visit Project Survival – www.cathaven.com/shop/

Visit Eco-Sys Action - http://www.ecosysfun.com/cheetah.html
and Cheetah Friends Europe: http://www.cheetahfriends.nl/projecten.html