A three-week-old cub squashes one of its two litter mates during a brief visit by Mills to the den while the mother was out hunting. Mills and his team need to count the cubs and collect DNA from fur samples in order to establish paternity. Such brief interactions do not disturb the cheetahs, and they have never observed any adverse reaction by the mother or cubs.For the past five years, Gus Mills and his wife have been studying the approximately 350 cheetahs that live in the Kalahari, a highly arid environment consisting primarily of vegetated sand dunes. In often scorching conditions, Mills tracks cheetah lifestyle patterns through a variety of data collection methods. Mills is a National Geographic Big Cats grantee.
