53 hours: Inside the largest cheetah relocation ever attempted
Moving a cheetah to a new home is risky—but necessary for the survival of the species. This is the tale of one particularly harrowing journey.
The yowling of cheetahs tore through the pitch-black night. A line of six Land Cruisers, each carrying two or three of the semi-sedated cats, lurched over dirt mounds along a lonely road in Mozambique. Most of the team transporting the animals hadn’t eaten in 20 hours, aside from stale buns they’d scavenged. An unseasonable rain had stranded their plane and forced them on the unexpected 53-hour overland journey.
Behind one cruiser, a large female cheetah thrashed and screamed inside her crate—an especially unnerving sound when there was nothing but dense woodland and deafening blackness engulfing the vehicles.
Cheetah translocations are known to be risky. Even on the easiest of journeys—an uncomplicated plane ride and subsequent release to the unfenced wild—cheetah translocations can have a 40 to 50 percent mortality rate. Despite the risks, conservationists have increasingly turned to translocations in recent decades as they are essential to maximizing the genetic diversity needed for their species’ survival, says conservation biologist and founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund Laurie Marker. Cheetahs are the most sensitive of the wild cats, and there are fewer than 7,100 remaining worldwide both in the wild and in captivity. “The idea is to augment the population, a few animals every few years,” she adds.
The overland journey was especially ambitious: moving 16 cheetahs in the largest translocation ever attempted. Robbie Kroger, founder of the Origins Foundation, a United States nonprofit that argues hunters can and should also be conservationists, and Justin Rodger, operations director of Panyame Conservancy, a sanctuary in western Mozambique, hatched the plan to relocate cheetahs from South Africa to the sanctuary in the spring of 2025 to increase the species’ genetic diversity and return them to their ancestral range.
There was reason to hope the translocation would be successful. A “ghost cheetah” had already been identified on the reserve through confirmed footprints, though no direct sighting had yet been made. His presence was a sign that introducing more cheetahs to the 200,000 hectares of unfenced land would be successful, giving the animals enough space to roam—and mate. If everything went as planned, these cheetahs would never be hunted again.
But everything that could go wrong was going wrong. Origins struggled to navigate the bureaucracy of African customs after the death of their head of permitting, Vincent Van Der Merwe, a National Geographic Explorer and a key figure in the reintroduction of cheetah to India in 2022, one month prior to the move. Forty-eight hours before the translocation, torrential rain closed the only airstrip that allowed safe landing near Panyame Conservancy. When an attempt to reroute to a nearby airstrip in Zimbabwe failed, Rodger decided to fly into another Mozambique airport, which would require a long journey overland.
Over the course of 53 hours, the team moved 12 cheetahs almost a thousand miles, or 1,600 kilometers, across Mozambique, with the other four following a month later. Although Marker says the real success of a cheetah translocation cannot be determined for “20 or 30 years,” for now, the translocation has seen promising signs: Just weeks ago, a relocated female South African cheetah named Kazi gave birth to three cheetah cubs in their new home—the first to be born from this transplanted population.
But before the cheetahs could begin building a future in Mozambique, the team first had to undertake the difficult and delicate task of transporting them safely across southern Africa. This is the story of those harrowing 53 hours.
Hour zero: Darting 12 big cats
On April 14, 2025, Mike Toft, a South African vet of 48 years, slept next to the crate of a distressed cheetah, softly cooing in response to her anxious chirping. Kazi, the four-year-old female, had been darted with a sedative along with another female, Faith, earlier that day in Northern Zululand. They were to meet their 10 other translocation mates in Johannesburg, then onto Panyame Conservancy.
(Photographing the sleepless, three-day effort to save an injured cheetah.)
For the last 11 months several of the cheetahs had been confined to their bomas, a type of fenced enclosure used before translocations by conservationists with a surplus of rescued cats. Vets try to limit time spent in these pens, as cheetahs are “losing muscle mass, not hunting, not exercising, basically losing fitness,” Rodger explains. This was one reason why Rodger didn’t want to wait to release the cheetahs to the unfenced Mozambiquan wild, despite the risks associated with translocations. The risk of doing nothing was far greater.
But first the team needed to sedate them.
Darting big cats is an art, with fatal consequences if executed incorrectly—though far more dangerous for the cat. Usually, the most anxious animal is darted first, with the shooter aiming for the meaty parts of their hind quarters or shoulders. Once the rest of the cheetahs clock what’s happening, these animals—the fastest land mammals on Earth—become exceedingly difficult to catch in their 150x150-foot bomas.
“It’s not like shooting a fish in a barrel,” Toft says. The five-inch dart itself can cause real damage too. If placed incorrectly, “they can break legs, they can break ribs,” says another South African vet on the project, Andy Fraser.
An animal’s stress level when captured can be critical to their survival in these delicate operations. As Kazi settled into her crate in the dark, Toft made the call: “She’s ready.”
Hour 18: A urine-soaked floor on the Embraer 120
At Johannesburg’s Tambo International Airport, a crowd of airport staff and spectators waited on the Fireblade Terminal tarmac to help load 12 200-pound crates onto a borrowed Embraer 120 ER Turbo Prop that would take them to Tete, Mozambique. The aircraft’s leather recliners had been replaced with 80 meters of black plastic sheeting, duct taped to the floor to accommodate the cheetahs.
Cheetah urine wafted in the air—“sweet and pungent,” Rodger recalls, like “smelly socks soaked in honey.”
Then: “BOOM, BOOM, BOOM,” Rodger says. “You can hear one of the crates start.” Kazi was thrashing again, her crate shaking frantically.
“Not all cats travel as well as others,” Toft explains. “You just don’t know with [cheetahs].” There wasn’t much to do but provide another sedative. Chronic stress among cats can kill, but in reality, there was no turning back.
Hour 36: Car crash in the cheetah Land Cruiser
Once the plane landed in Mozambique the cheetahs were transferred to 4x4 vehicles rented 48 hours prior when the team knew their flight was diverted. The team was packed like sardines with two to three cheetahs in the bed of each Land Cruiser.
The dirt road, lined with dense woodland, usually serves as a carriageway with a speed limit of 40 miles an hour. However, the road’s drivability had been severely underestimated by Panyame’s sources. Rodger set the pace as the front car, about 10 miles an hour, “cognizant every time you hit a little bump, [you’re thinking of] …these poor animals in their crates.” The convoy had been traveling, bumper to bumper, for the last 12 hours.
(How trafficked cheetah cubs move from the wild and into your Instagram feed.)
Kazi had been screaming through the night when the car crash happened. Fraser remembers suddenly waking from his half-sleep to his driver “slamming on brakes, sliding downhill” into the third cruiser. The collision easily ripped through the front of the fourth vehicle, with the “whole radiator just pouring water all over the road.” Everyone sprang into action, jumping from their cruisers, some pointing fingers, some denying fault.
“Shut up!” Rodger recalls shouting. “Get the cheetahs off that truck!” The only saving grace was that the third cruiser’s truck bed held no cats; only suitcases, all replaceable. Working fast, the men strapped the luggage to the roof of the third vehicle while everyone else heaved the crates from the impaired vehicle into the now-empty truck bed. From the back came the soft chirping of the cheetahs, thankfully unharmed in their crates, which were intact. It was hour 36. The croc-infested rivers were still waiting ahead to be crossed.
Hour 44: Carnivores saved by the rain
As the sun glimmered over the dense treetops, Rodger had one feeling: “terrified self-loathing” that the long journey might harm the cats, a feeling he mitigated with an endless string of Dunhill White cigarettes. The road conditions nearly doubled the predicted drive time as 10 hours turned to 20, with the convoy more than 60 miles from their next destination. Worse: The sun was rising.
Most long-haul exotic animal translocations are nighttime endeavors to avoid being caught by the unforgiving African sun. Fraser, Toft, and Rodger were acutely aware of the ticking clock. “There’s a big concern with [cheetahs] overheating,” Marker says, as research shows the cats are sensitive to high temperatures. Due to the snail’s pace of the road conditions, the cheetahs also lacked proper airflow through their crate holes. The vets were aware that the temperature could rise to an unbearable level if they were caught in the high noon sun.
“I cannot overstate [this enough] … we could have cooked all those cats,” says Fraser.
The vets had calculated that the cheetahs could be safely sedated and crated for up to 40 hours, expecting arrival at Panyame Conservancy right before sunrise. No one anticipated the translocation would stretch 13 hours past than their worst-case scenario.
“[Fraser] and I looked at each other at one stage and say, well, I don't know how many of these cats were going to make this journey,” Toft says, shaking his head.
Yet as the temperature rose, an unlikely savior suddenly appeared: “The convoy reached this mountain range and the sky just went black,” Rodger recalls. “Then the rain came.”
Hour 48: Crocodile river crossing in the Zambezi Valley
As the convoy arrived at the river’s edge, dozens of crocodiles perched on the sandy banks of the Zambezi River, watching as the cheetahs were loaded to a Pelican motorboat for their first crossing.
Within the past year, six members of the Chikunda tribe, guardians of the Zambezi, had been snatched by crocs from the shoreline, says Rodger. “You quickly realize that humans are not in control there,” Fraser explains. “You're just another creature in an ecosystem that is also prey.”
The river crossings were always going to be a non-negotiable on this journey, even if they had arrived at the closer airport. And so six months earlier, a deal was struck to use the tribe’s personal canoes for a second crossing on the Panyame River, which is too shallow for traditional motorboats. The chief of the Chikunda tribe had even performed a blessing for safe passage of the cheetahs—particularly for the second crossing, more dangerous than the first, says Talento Marcelo Luwemba, who attended the rituals on behalf of Panyame Conservancy.
(Rafting along the mighty Zambezi River.)
“We now have to prop these poor old cheetahs one at a time in a canoe and paddle them across,” Toft explains. Sandbanks littered the murky water; Fraser was in one of several cheetah canoes that ran aground. “[My] initial thought is to jump out onto the sand and push [us] off, and [Juga, a Chikunda tribesman] was like, no, no, no, no … you can't do that,” he recalls. Crocodiles patrolled these waters, undetectable until it was too late.
Whether unperturbed or simply exhausted, Kazi sat quietly like a sphinx, waiting to be freed as the two men worked relentlessly to move the canoe. She had stopped thrashing hours earlier, resigned to her crate. The canoe swayed in the water as Fraser and Juga wiggled their oars, finally breaking through the sand trap and moving swiftly to shore.
Hour 53: Release
Arrival at the temporary bomas at the Panyame Conservancy was unceremonious and solemn in the dead of night. The cats were released, some darting stiffly off as their crates were opened, others preferring the safety of their home of the past 53 hours.
None were dead on arrival, but a special eye was kept on Kazi, who had the worst reaction to the translocation. Close monitoring is critical after a translocation, Marker says, and the next three days would be perhaps the most important as the vets anxiously looked for a sign of recovery. “If they all start eating, then you can begin to relax,” says Fraser.
In a testament to their resilience throughout the journey, most of the cheetahs started eating a day after their arrival.
One year later
By conservation standards, the translocation appears to be an initial success despite the grueling and unpredictable 53-hour journey. Of the 16 cheetahs relocated in the spring of 2025, 14 have survived their first year—an 87 percent survival rate, well above that of most unfenced wild reintroductions.
“Releasing cheetahs back to where they once were is just amazing… They’re essential to an ecosystem,” says Marker. Most carnivores can consume a full prey animal over several days, cheetah prefer fresh kills—which leaves more sustenance for scavengers, smaller mammals, and insects. Cheetahs provide more food to other animals than any other predators, she says.
(See how nature is bouncing back in these rewilded landscapes.)
Several cheetahs have traveled hundreds of miles since their release, which has led to two metapopulations being established: Panyame, Mozambique, and Mana Pools, Zimbabwe. One cheetah in particular, Bugatti, a rambunctious female, has explored three countries, traveling over a thousand miles. Another female cheetah now in Zimbabwe, Sophie, has been tightening her range of exploration in the past month, which suggests she may be close to denning, says Origins Foundation founder Robbie Kroger.
Most encouraging of all was Kazi. In late April 2026, Kazi gave birth to three cubs, the first litter born in Mozambique from the 16 cheetahs relocated the previous spring.
Through GPS tracking, the Panyame Conservancy team noticed that Kazi and one of the males, Bushcat, had likely mated in early February. Helicopter sightings later suggested she might be pregnant, though, as Kroger knew, it was equally possible she had “simply eaten an enormous meal.” A week after the first sighting, however, “there still wasn’t blood on her face,” Kroger explained, “and she looked like she was carrying extra weight in her hindquarters.”
The team’s suspicions proved correct. “We’d been monitoring her very closely,” Rodger says. On May 2, “[the team] went up for a flight… and bang! We saw the cubs.”
“With it being almost exactly a year since the translocation, the birth is a big deal,” Fraser says.
However, the truth is that “reintroductions take a long time,” says Marker. “The post-release and monitoring is the most critical part. They are wild animals, but we are acting like God to some extent… Our job is not just to put them out there and let them go… We are a part of it now.”
With Southern Africa’s cheetah population increasing steadily, the Origins Foundation and Panyame Conservancy and planning more translocations in the future, as well as continuing the essential monitoring of their current cheetahs. With any luck, the next journey will be a little less eventful than the last, though Rodger knows much of that is beyond human control.
“Mother Nature is unforgiving,” he says, “She makes the rules.”
