Working with King Cheetah at the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre, South Africa for a client publishing a book later in the year.
King cheetah are infrequently seen in the wild. The last recorded sighting of a king cheetah in the wild was in 1986 in the Kruger National Park. They occur naturally in a localised area that covers adjoining portions of Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa (northern and eastern regions of the Limpopo Province). During the 1980s, a number of litters born in captivity contained king cheetah cubs, and since then it has become customary for some of the breeding facilities to focus on sustaining blood lines with the intention of breeding king cheetahs at will. The gene appears to be carried at a low frequency in the wild, and its occurrence is localised. Here in South Africa the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre has a genetic pool of king cheetah genes that can make it possible to breed king cheetah as colour variant, without the intention of breeding the king cheetah for commercial purposes.