Cheetahs, Dogs, and Goats. Oh my!

Hi Again!!
My name is McKenna Hancock and I am a Junior Zoo and Conservation Science and Biology Double Major at Otterbein University. I am currently a Dog Intern at the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Otjiwarongo, Namibia. Yep! I am one of the two dog interns here at CCF. 
The project I was given is the dogs, everything pertaining to them and their care. I have been crazy busy since being given this position. For those of you who do not know, CCF has a livestock guarding program. What that entails is that we give farmers in the area a livestock guarding dog, specifically an Anatolian Shepard for a small ;fee. Then the farmers send their livestock out to graze with the dog and the dog protect the livestock at all cost. This project has given the farmers a tangible object to protect their livestock against large carnivores in the area. This means the farmers kill less of those large carnivores and Cheetahs, Leopards, and African Wild Dogs benefit from this program. There is about a two year waiting list for these dogs! 

So what do I do? I help feed the dogs, twice a day for most dogs and three times a day for the ones with puppies. I help take care of the puppies and weigh them every single day, as well as take the temperature and monitor the mothers that are pregnant and soon to give birth. Monday the 17th one of our females went into labor at around 5pm, being one of the dog interns I was tasked with sitting in with the mother and the dog staff monitoring as she gives birth. It was honestly one of the coolest experiences getting to sit in on the birth. While we were in there we recorded the time each puppy was born and any notable other things, like the mothers contractions and whether the puppies were suckling. From 5pm to 11am the next day Repet (the mother) had 11 puppies!!! It was a very long night but it was very worth it. After the birth I took to drawing out the chest markings on every puppy on a piece of paper and any other notable markings that could help us tell them apart. Along with a weight and a number that would help us monitor each puppy to make sure they are all healthy and gaining weight. These little 11 puppies will soon be saving Cheetahs in the wild. With the puppies we want them to care more about the livestock then they do about us, so they get goats in with them when they are still young. As well as we want to spend as little time with them as possible so they do not bond to humans but to the livestock. 

Alongside the puppies I am also doing parasitology on the dogs to make sure that they are healthy, basically we take a fecal from the dog and we "float" the fecal using the McMasters method. Then we view it under the microscope to see if we see any eggs from parasites in their fecal. It is a lot of work but it is something I have never done before and I probably would not have learned it if not for this place.