Video of a man sleeping beside cheetah is not from India

The video is not from India neither the man in the video is the priest of Pipleshwar Mahadev temple.

A video showing a man sleeping alongside three cheetahs is widely circulating on social media. It is being claimed that the video is from the temple of Pipleshwar Mahadev in Sirohi, Rajasthan. It is further claimed that the priest of the temple sleeps with the family of leopards, which is why the Government Wildlife Department installed CCTV cameras to capture this beautiful moment.

The caption of the post mentions, “There is a temple of Pipleshwar Mahadev in Sirohi village of Rajasthan, where the family of leopards sleeps near the priest at night. When the Government Wildlife Department came to know about this, they installed CCTV cameras there. You also see this beautiful scene.”

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Fact Check- 

We started our investigation by running a keyword search on YouTube whose results led us to a longer version of the video posted by a channel named Dolph C Volker on 21 January 2019. The headline of the video states “Do Cheetahs Prefer Cold Hard Concrete Or Warm Blankets Pillow & A Friend? | Three BIG CAT Night.” According to the description of the channel he (Dolph C Volker) is an animal advocate according to the about section of the channel. 

According to the description of the video, these Cheetahs are from a Cheetah breeding centre called Cheetah Experience in South Africa where he spent the night sleeping alongside these Cheetahs.

Moving on, we found a tweet posted by IFS Parveen Kaswan on 10 June 2020 stating that video credits goes to Dolph C Volker. Going through the comments, we found a Twitter user who mentioned that the video is from an experiment called “The Cheetah Experience” conducted in South Africa in 2018. He also mentioned that the name of the cheetah is Gabriel and Volker. 

Keeping this in mind, we ran a keyword search on Google and found few news articles that wrote about Dolph C Volker and his love for Cheetah. They have published several images of Dolph hugging and sleeping with his Cheetah. You can read the news article here.

Conclusion- 

Fact Crescendo found the claim made along with the video to be False. The video is not from India. It does not show a CCTV footage of the Pipleshwar Mahadev temple in Rajasthan. The video dates back to 2018 showing an incident from an experiment called “The Cheetah Experience” conducted in South Africa.

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