New hope for Wild cats.

Byline: BOB KEEFER The Register-Guard

WILDLIFE SAFARI has long been known for its cheetahs. The logo of the wild animal park near Winston, southwest of Roseburg, is a picture of a cheetah. The park has kept as many as 22 of the cats at one time. A decade ago, a former Wildlife Safari staffer went on to found - and still runs - the international Cheetah Conservation Fund, based in the African nation of Namibia, which is home to much of the world's population of wild cheetahs.

The Oregon wild animal park is soon expecting to make one more leap forward in conservation of the endangered great cat, which is the fastest short-distance runner in the world - it can hit 70 mph in short bursts - but whose numbers are steadily dropping both in the wild and in captivity. Though estimates vary, African cheetahs may number as few as 12,000 in the wild, with another 1,000 in zoos around the world - down from hundreds of thousands of the animals a century ago.

As summer ends, a team of expert veterinarians from the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoo in Washington, D.C., is coming to Winston to use a recently developed surgical technique to artificially inseminate three female cheetahs: 8-year-old Jocara; 4-year-old Jalani; and 4-year-old Topaz.

If all goes well, in three months the park will have three new litters of cheetah cubs.

But none of it will have happened the old-fashioned way. Instead of two cheetahs meeting and falling in love, let's say, the matches will have been arranged by what amounts to a worldwide cheetah dating service. And the cheetah fathers - in the wild in Africa - will be pretty much unaware of their role in the proceedings, having done their entire part under anesthesia.

The whole thing is happening at Wildlife Safari, to a large degree, because a veterinarian in Tennessee decided he couldn't afford to support a family on what a zoo vet makes.

Dr. Sean Barrett worked with clouded leopards at the Nashville Zoo for eight years. There he came to know Dr. Buddha Pukazhenthi - whom most people seem to call simply ``Dr. Buddha'' - and JoGayle Howard, both of the National Zoo, who together developed a hormonal and surgical technique for implanting sperm in large cats. The three became friends as well as colleagues.

Two years ago, Barrett, who now has four children, moved his family to Eugene, where he and his wife, Cary, bought the Santa Clara Animal Clinic.

"The reality of the zoo field, unfortunately, is that it's a wonderful job," he says. "But it doesn't pay very well. It's a passion that you have, but it's difficult to pay the bills."

Barrett missed working with wild animals, so he began volunteering at Wildlife Safari, where he met senior veterinarian Modesto McClean. The two men hit it off, and Barrett began wondering whether Pukazhenthi and Howard's technique might be used on the Wildlife Safari cheetahs.

Wildlife Safari wanted more cheetahs, McClean says. The park has had an unusually good breeding record over the years with more than 130 past cheetah births from captive breeding, done the old-fashioned way.

But even though the park has four females, including three of breeding age, as well as two males, zoos don't just throw any cats together these days and hope for a litter.

In an effort to ensure genetic diversity - in other words, to counter inbreeding that results from putting the same cats together over and over again - the Cheetah Species Survival Plan of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association in Bethesda, Md., plans appropriate cheetah matches for institutions around the world.

Genetic diversity is an especially sensitive issue with cheetahs. For some reason, and theories abound as to why, cheetahs everywhere are far less diverse genetically than other populations of animals.

One reason sometimes offered is that cheetahs were bred in captivity in large numbers several millennia ago by the Egyptians. Inbreeding and then releasing a large number of cats could have caused a genetic bottleneck that remains today. Another explanation is that the cats are so exquisitely evolved for one task - running very fast and killing gazelle or antelope - that genetic variations disappeared.

A third possibility is that the worldwide population may have come near extinction at some time in recent pre-history, say 10,000 years ago, creating a genetic bottleneck.

But whatever the reason, today's wild cheetahs are so closely related genetically that, Barrett says, you can actually transplant patches of skin between apparently unrelated cheetahs without biological rejection.

So zoos would like to bring in new blood.

"What has happened over the years is that in captivity we have fewer and fewer animals that are reproducing," Barrett says. "How can we bring in more genetic diversity from the wild?"

Long-distance matches between cheetahs can be difficult to arrange. Imagine the logistics of transporting an adult cat half way around the world for a love bout. And wild cats are much more difficult to capture and move than they have been in the past because of restrictions protecting endangered species.

Artificial insemination starts to look pretty good.

Next problem: bad cheetah sperm. Perhaps related to the genetic diversity issue is the fact that almost all male cheetahs have what Barrett calls "abnormal" sperm. "Most of these cats' sperm have kinked tails or double heads or droplets on their tails, all of which are abnormal conditions," he says. "Many, many of these male cheetahs have such abnormal sperm, and in such low numbers, that their chance of fertility is none."

Once again, artificial insemination solves the problem. You can look at the sperm before using it.

Now imagine how much fun it would be trying to artificially inseminate a wide-awake full-grown cheetah, the way you might a dairy cow, and you begin to understand the appeal of Pukazhenthi and Howard's surgical technique, which is done under full anesthesia.

The technique, McClean says, is not only safer for cat and vet alike but more likely to result in a litter of new cheetah cubs three months down the line. McClean says the chance of pregnancy resulting from the new procedure is about 46 percent, compared to roughly 10 percent when the sperm is inserted vaginally.

"Anyway, there is no way you could do this the same way you do with a cow or horse," he says. "Cheetahs are wild animals."

That doesn't mean the insemination procedure is simple. Cheetahs, like house cats, ovulate when stimulated by sexual intercourse. In both species of cats, the male's penis has barbs on the end that tweak the female's uterus when he pulls out, causing ovulation at just the right time for the egg to be fertilized. This is also painful for the female.

"That's why she turns around and whacks him," McClean says.

This odd biological mechanism is one reason that house cats are able to reproduce so rapidly, as it's very good at ensuring fertilization. The trick is to find a way to get the female to release an egg right on time for the artificial insemination. Pukazhenthi, a veterinary endocrinologist, has come up with a hormone injection that seems to do the trick.

The second problem, though, is that cheetahs also ovulate spontaneously at times, perhaps in response to random stressors like a thunderstorm. If the female cat ovulates for any reason too soon before the insemination procedure, there won't be another egg ready to go.

Pukazhenthi has also solved that problem hormonally with what amounts to a kitty Norplant, similar to the popular birth control implant for women. In the week before the planned insemination, McClean will anesthetize the three Wildlife Safari females and place hormonal implants under their skin. The implants will later be removed, again under anesthesia, a week before the final insemination.

Finally, Pukazhenthi and Howard will arrive with an entire laboratory of equipment, including vials of frozen cheetah sperm from Namibia. The Wildlife Safari cats will be anesthetized a third time. Howard will make a small incision in each one's abdomen, inserting the African cheetah sperm directly into the uterus using a laparoscope.

When the cats wake up, if all goes well, each one will be pregnant, and each will produce a litter of up to five cubs in 94 days.

"Basically cheetahs are in big trouble around the world," McClean says. "They are a delicate animal. They run so fast, and they're tough, but they are a very narrow, special kind of animal."

"This is at the forefront of what needs to be done," Barrett says. "Cheetahs are the animals with the least genetic diversity and the most problems when it comes to reproducing in captivity."

CAPTION(S):

One of Wildlife Safari's six cheetahs saunters past a park ranger's vehicle. An attempt is under way to artificially inseminate three Wildlife Safari cheetahs. "Cheetahs are in big trouble around the world. ... They are a delicate animal. They run so fast, and they're tough, but they are a very narrow, special kind of animal." - MODESTO McCLEAN, Wildlife Safari veterinarian