Family Chased by Cheetahs at Dutch Safari Park Highlights Dangers

A family with a small child had to run
for their lives when two cheetahs chased them back to their car in
Holland’s Safari Park Beekse
Bergen^[1]. Luckily, the cheetahs
were not hungry but simply protecting their territory, safari park
manager Niels de Wildt told a Dutch
radio station^[2].

The video clip shows the family of five,
including a very young child, standing on top of a grass bank a
good 30 yards from their car in the middle of the drive-through
safari park—which features a number of free-roaming cheetahs. The
family had just driven past a group of cheetahs resting in the
shade when they got out of their car and, turning their backs on
the big cats, wandered up onto a field to look at something else.
The cheetahs quickly spot them and race over and, snarling
aggressively, chase the panicked family back to their
car.

“As a parent when I saw that young child in the video…I was
afraid of what was going to happen next,” said Luke
Dollar^[3], a conservation
biologist and National Geographic explorer who is also a professor
at Catawba College. People forget that big cats are top predators
and to them we are prey, Dollar said.

Fortunately, no one was injured. The outcome might have been
very different had it been another of the big cats. Cheetahs are
not an aggressive big cat species like a lion, leopard, or tiger,
said Laurie Marker, founder and executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund
(CCF)^[4]. “They are curious and
will investigate unusual things happening in their habitat,” Marker
said.

Marker said the family was lucky no injuries resulted from their
behavior. “Getting a closer look is never worth putting yourself or
small children at risk,” she said.

Two years ago a woman who got out of her car in China’s Badaling
Wildlife Park near Beijing wasn’t trying to get a closer look
when a
tiger attacked her^[5]. The woman was badly
mauled while her mother, who tried to help her, was killed by
another tiger.

Like all safari parks, the Dutch park has signs in several
languages telling visitors they are forbidden to leave their
vehicles. And yet people ignore the warnings, and every year people
are injured or killed in wildlife parks, often in hopes of getting
a better photograph or selfies. In 2015, an American
tourist was killed by a lion in South Africa^[6]
while taking pictures through an open window in the safari jeep
while in Lion and Safari Park near Johannesburg. The park tells
visitors to keep windows rolled up at all times.

Some wildlife attractions even allow or fail to prevent people
from feeding dangerous animals, such as bears, through open car
windows as this
2017 video shows^[7]
from the Badaling Wildlife Park in Beijing. Fortunately, no one was
injured that day.

“I have mixed feelings about safari or wildlife parks,” said
Dollar. Often it is the only way for people to personally
experience big cats and other wild animals, but these animals
should not be taken from the wild, he said.

People should always give wildlife the respect they deserve,
Dollar said. The family visiting Safari Park Beekse Bergen were
lucky to escape with a scare, he added.