Rare refuge

Two cheetah cubs find a place in Ethiopia's presidential palace.

On the expansive grounds of the National Palace, the official residence of Ethiopia's president, two malnourished cheetah cubs live as special guests, playfully pawing each other and lapping up milk from a plastic bowl.

The four-month-old cats, covered with black spots, are being nursed back to health after being rescued in November by an Ethiopian veterinarian and US counter-terrorism soldiers, who were shocked to find the cubs tied with rope and forced to fight each other at a restaurant in a remote village.

The cheetah is an endangered animal. The restaurant owner told Ethiopian authorities that he had bought these two from a poacher to draw customers.

While their new conditions in an L-shaped stone cage are not perfect, they're a real improvement, said Kora Tulu, manager of a zoo that has existed for years on the palace grounds. He is giving medical treatment to the cheetahs, one of which was blinded in an eye by abuse.

The cubs' plight and rescue generated international attention and offers of help from animal conservation groups around the world. The cheetahs also provided a window into a larger problem of poaching and of wildlife laws that are routinely broken in hopes of profit in one of the world's poorest countries.

"There's a real lack of awareness in Ethiopia about the treatment of animals," said Tulu, holding the female cub and combing her ragged fur. "Because of the poor financial situation, Ethiopians give priority to their basic needs, selling an animal's skin or hunting them for money. We don't view the wildlife as national gifts. Such ideas are a luxury of the rich Western nations. Trust me, these animals are a lot safer if they are in a zoo."

This Horn of Africa country was once home to some of the continent's largest populations of elephants, black rhinos and giraffes. But starting in ancient times, its wildlife population has been depleted for commercial gain.

Status symbol

During the Aksumite kingdom of the 1st to 6th centuries AD, royalty in Egypt paid hefty prices to Ethiopian hunters for ivory and rhino horn. The pearly cream- coloured horn was used to make bracelets and to adorn furniture and palaces. Ivory was a status symbol as much in demand as diamonds are today, according to researchers. Rulers used elephants to pull royal chariots and whipped them for the entertainment of guests.

Today the country's 10 national parks are physically beautiful, yet largely barren of the elephant or rhino populations seen in neighbouring Kenya and countries in southern Africa, which have sought to preserve their wildlife to draw tourists.

Ethiopia's parks do retain some endemic animals - 16 species of birds, for instance, the walia ibex goat, several rare frog species and the gelada, or red-heart baboons. There is valuable herbal plant life as well, such as St. John's Wort, used to treat depression. Ethiopia's bush is home to more than 600 species of flora, including the ivory- coloured Abyssinian rose, that Ethiopians use as traditional remedies for malaria and other ills. But with the country's human population exploding - it has quadrupled to more than 74 million in the last 65 years - government officials are concerned that what is left of Ethiopia's flora and fauna will be depleted.

Eyeing tourists

In the country's Simien Mountains in the north, small numbers of foreign visitors trek along misty paths. Rangers who guide them say they are trying to educate the locals to safeguard the wild goats and even the St. John's Wort, which some people use to build huts.

"The idea is that protecting our resources will draw tourists here like they do in Kenya and other parts of Africa," said Ababa Getachew, a ranger, who spent a recent afternoon with some Simien Mountain children trying to persuade them not to throw rocks at the baboons, which sometimes snack on their crops. "But it's not always easy, since many Ethiopians don't benefit directly from tourists and they are just trying to survive off the land."

Many Ethiopians found the recent attention paid to the cheetah cubs ridiculous when this country is struggling with poverty, nearly a million people rely on food aid and a disputed election resulted in violence and thousands of political arrests.

"It's difficult to garner support for some animals when the country has a history of famine and drought," said Abayneh Telake, mayor of Gondor, 40 miles south of the Simien Mountains. "When we heard about this, some people thought: Do governments care more about animals than they do people?"

Some government officials call that attitude short-sighted. They point to Kenya, which is gaining economic benefit from saving its wildlife and winning international praise through citizens such as Wangari Maathai, an activist who founded an Africa-wide movement that planted millions of trees in ravaged forestland. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

But Ethiopia has few environmental activists, and its poaching laws are rarely enforced. Conservation policies routinely crumble as families kill rare goats or cut down trees just to stay alive.

"Because of our poverty, we have had an outlook that is human- centred, not eco- centred, because our people have a right to survive," said Dessalegne Mesfin, deputy director of Ethiopia's Environmental Protection Authority, which is located outside the capital next to a series of logging companies. "In some ways we have to go for our people's interest and try to find some compromises where we can."