Video from South Africa shared as man cuddling with cheetah in Pipleshwar Mahadev temple

by Archit

Several social media users have shared a video of a person sleeping with cheetahs. As per the claim, the video is from Pipleshwar Mahadev, a Rajasthan-based Hindu temple in Mochhal.

The video was widespread on Facebook in the last week of July.

The same video was also circulating last year.

In Rajasthan at Siriholini Village, daily at night a Cheetah with his family comes and sleeps with the priest of Pipaleshwar Temple . This was going on for a while and one day this guy mentioned it to the wildlife department. They fitted a CCTV to record it.

Posted by Anurag Sharma on Wednesday, 23 December 2020

Twitter @Shobhana111 shared the video in August 2020 drawing 1,000 views at the time of writing. (archived link)

Fact-check

Alt News performed a keyword search on YouTube and found that the video in question was uploaded by Dolph C. Volker.

The video is titled ‘Do Cheetahs Prefer Cold Hard Concrete Or Warm Blankets Pillow & A Friend? | Three BIG CAT Night’ and it has over 140 lakh views. As per the YouTube channel’s about section, Volker is a South Africa-based animal rights advocate and has studied zoology. He has close to 5 lakh YouTube subscribers. Alt News searched for his Facebook profile where we learned that he identifies as ‘The Cheetah Whisperer’.

As per the video description, the cheetahs in the video were bred and born at Cheetah Experience, a South Africa based cheetah breeding centre. According to the description, one of the cheetahs was supposed to be released into a protected wild area. Volker concluded that cheetahs are like house cats when it comes to their preference to sleep. They prefer a warm bed as opposed to a cold floor.

In 2015, NDTV wrote an article on Volker according to which he has been volunteering at Cheetah Experience at least since 2014.

Thus the social media claim that the video is from Pipleshwar Mahadev Temple, Rajasthan is false. It was uploaded by popular South African animal advocate Dolph C. Volker in 2019 on his YouTube channel.

About the Author

ЁЯЩП Blessed to have worked as a fact-checking journalist from November 2019 to February 2023.