As in the rest of Africa, conservation is integral to South Africa's story. Population decline, genetic diversity and habitat loss are all important subjects, but they are also complex ones most citizens know far too little about.
Many of us live far removed from ecological realities. Meat arrives packaged, food comes straight from the grocery store and wild animals are displaced as entertainment where we glimpse them on a screen or through the window on a game-drive.
As progress dictates the worlds we construct around ourselves, we become progressively disconnected from the natural world that sustains us. That can make it difficult for people to care about environmental crises that are, essentially, out of sight and out of mind.
So, how do you make a long-term conservation initiative legible to someone encountering it from the outside?
It's the art in storytelling, and for conservation writers it starts small. Statistics about an entire species can feel abstract, and you'll likely lose readers' attention quickly. A single animal is always easier to care about and form an attachment to. Just consider the media frenzy around the rejected orangutan, Punch, at the beginning of this year as an example.
It is, however, that foothold of empathy that carries your audience towards the larger ecological issue.
Wildlife Writer, Sarah Pye, argues that individual animals can provide an entry point into much larger conservation questions. The individual animal's experiences help readers understand issues affecting the whole species, though Pye stresses that these stories must stay grounded in research and real animal behaviour.
The choice of protagonist also matters, because it shapes how readers engage with the story.
Running Wild Cheetah Conservation, based in South Africa, breeds cheetahs specifically for this kind of reintroduction onto suitable protected reserves: each cub raised through hunting training, predator avoidance, release and post-release monitoring becomes one animal with one distinct story.
In the case where animals are unable to return to the wild, the conservation provides them with lifelong care. Volunteers have the opportunity to be part of that care, spending weeks at a time on daily feeding, enrichment and rehabilitation work which offers a hands-on way of getting to know the animals and their life journeys.
Each of those stages is a chapter in an individual animal's story — and story is exactly what inspires people to take action. Telling one cheetah's story, and telling it well, lets your audience understand what reintroduction to the wild demands, and why it matters for the species as a whole.
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*Image courtesy of Canva
**Information sourced from World of Wildlife and Running Wild Cheetah Conservation