Third Hero: Deon Cilliers

Deon Cilliers is the project manager for the Cheetah Outreach Trust with over 30 years of experience in nature conservation. His main focus is on free-roaming cheetahs, but his work includes other vulnerable and endangered predators including leopard and brown hyena that occur in farmland areas and finding ways to secure their future through integrated human and predator conflict mitigation strategies.

He has been actively involved in developing local non-lethal predator management methods and developed, coordinated and implemented conservation strategies and research projects focused on the conservation of cheetahs outside of protected areas in South Africa.

He assists landowners in preventing and/or minimizing wildlife damage relating to large predators including cheetah, leopard, hyena and African Wild Dogs and where necessary relocating and/or rewilding problem predators. Of the globally remaining 6674 cheetahs – approximately 1,326 cheetahs remain in South Africa of which approximately 500 are free-roaming cheetahs living on farmlands.