Late January 2021, reports circulating on social media claim that they show a video of wild cheetahs hanging out with a farmer in Rajasthan, India. Although the footage is authentic, it does not come from India, but from a cheetah center in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
Posts that share the track and make this claim can be found here, here and here.
One clip with more than 1,800 shares (here) has the following caption: ‘Every night, in Rajasthan, India, at Siriholini Village, a wild cheetah and his family sleep in a farmer’s hut and feast with the farmer. It happened for a while, but no one believed the poor farmer when he told them about it … until one day when he mentioned it to an official at the local wildlife department. Just for fun, they installed a CCTV camera in his cabin. This is what they saw. ”
The clip comes from a YouTube video uploaded two years ago by a user named Dolph C. Volker (here). At the time of the publication of this fact check, Volker’s video, entitled “Do cheetahs prefer cold, hard concrete or pillows and a friend? | Three BIG CAT Night, ”has been viewed more than 15.1 million times. At the beginning of the video, a sign showing ‘Cheetah Experience’ is visible one kilometer further.
In a 2018 video, produced by the British news agency Barcroft TV, Volker is reunited with a male cheetah named Gabriel after a year apart. According to the description, Volker is a volunteer at the Cheetah Experience Breeding Center in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where the recordings of their reunion were taken, as well as the 2019 recording of Volker sleeping with the cheetah family.
According to its website (www.cheetahexperience.com/), the Cheetah Experience ” is home to a number of endangered and endangered species, including cheetahs, leopards, non-breeding lions, slaves, caracals, African feral cats, wolves, meerkats and a Siberian tiger. It sets out its long-term goal of ‘releasing some animals into a protected but self-sustaining natural habitat, where animals are still monitored by researchers and medical experts, but live freely’.
Around 3:40 in Volker’s video, he refers to a Cheetah named Juno (youtu.be/i3waAOcJkps?t=220), also on Cheetah Experience’s website (here). Cheetah Experience confirmed by email to Reuters that Volker’s video was recorded in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
VERDICT
Failure. This footage of a man sleeping with cheetahs does not come from Rajasthan, India, but rather from Bloemfontein, South Africa.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.