Back in the 1970s, Dr. Laurie Marker hand-raised a cheetah cub and successfully taught it to hunt, sparking a lifelong mission. Since then, she’s built the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia, a global model of wildlife protection that also works to strengthen the communities who live alongside the animals.
With fewer than 7,000 cheetahs left in the wild, her work has never been more urgent. Dr. Marker was in Boston to speak at the Franklin Park Zoo, and she joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to celebrate her lifelong mission to save cheetahs from extinction on the Joy Beat. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: It’s lovely to have you. I know you’ve talked and written about this before, but I want to talk about your origin story, like you’re a superhero, the beginning of your story with cheetahs — how you came to find yourself in possession of a cheetah cub, and how you figured out how to raise it. I can’t imagine there were books on the subject.
Dr. Laurie Marker: Well, there were no books, but I ran a wildlife park in Oregon called the Wildlife Safari, very similar to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, which is so well-known. I ran the [Oregon] wildlife park, and we were one of the few places in the world that had cheetahs.
I developed a very successful breeding program, of which cheetahs are an animal that don’t breed well in captivity. Back in the 70s, at the start of what’s called CITES — which is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species — an international program that really stopped the export of wild animals out of their country of origin, so zoos had to start working together to breed animals.
I developed what’s called the “Studbook,” or a registry of the cheetahs that are in captivity around the world, and asked many questions around the world. People said, “We don’t know much about cheetahs, but when you learn something about them, let us know. They don’t breed well in captivity, they have a short lifespan, and we’re losing them in the wild.”
Zoos actually got together, and we started talking about breeding programs and maximizing genetic diversity with the vision that eventually these animals could go back out into the wild. However, we have to do some research on that, so I was the first person on the ground to find out if a captive cheetah could learn how to hunt. [The cheetah cub] took me to Namibia, Southwest Africa, in the middle of the 1970s, and that is where I taught her how to hunt.
But I also learned that the wild cheetah population was declining in the masses. Farmers were killing hundreds of cheetahs per year, thinking that they might be catching their livestock. It was more of a perceived threat than it was actual. That’s really what got me on my road to helping try to save the cheetah.
Rath: Can you explain to people, when an animal population is threatened or endangered, how important these kinds of breeding programs are — the genetic diversity that you were talking about?
Marker: It’s very critical. You have to work on so many different levels to save species, but our zoos today play a very key role in maximizing the genetic diversity through breeding programs. Here in the United States, they’re called “species survival programs.”
Cheetahs today are found in approximately 300 facilities in about a hundred countries, but there are actually only 2,000 cheetahs that are living in zoos.
Rath: Tell us about working with the people in Namibia and other countries, because you mentioned that was almost something you saw right away. Since then, with the Cheetah Conservation Fund, you’ve worked with farmers, students and scientists from across Africa.
Marker: Yes, I had gone from my work here in the United States and kept going back to Africa because I just wanted to know where the wild populations were living — and covered most of the ranges of the cheetahs during the next 10 or 15 years. Then, I moved to the Smithsonian, the National Zoo, where I continued my research on cheetahs.
Then, after the independence of Namibia in 1990, I set up the Cheetah Conservation Fund and moved to Namibia. I thought that there might be some other organizations somewhere in the world that would take on saving species, but I found that there were none.
That’s why I set up the Cheetah Conservation Fund and have been able to help the country not only save its cheetahs and stabilize the population, but also spread our program throughout the cheetah’s range. But today, there are only 7,000 cheetahs left in the wild, and we have a lot of work to do, so a lot of our programs are scaling up.
Most of the cheetahs left in the world are not found in protected areas. They’re found outside of protected areas. Cheetahs are a small cat — they’re the fastest of all the land animals, and the smallest of the big cats — but they are not an aggressive animal. They have flight versus fight. In the game reserves where other large carnivores are protected, like the lions and hyenas, they actually out-compete the cheetah.
The cheetah is actually the best hunter on the savanna, and it makes many kills, but loses many of them to these other large predators. With that, the cheetahs actually get pushed out of these protected areas and have found areas on landscapes throughout Africa where, unfortunately, humans are, with their livestock. That’s why there’s a lot of human-wildlife conflict.
Our programs that we’ve developed in Namibia really revolve around trying to mitigate this human-wildlife conflict. We use things like livestock guarding dogs. We’ve actually seen between an 80 to 100% reduction of livestock loss — not just to cheetahs, but to all the other predators.
Rath: I know that there’s no way that you can raise any kind of creature and not develop a very powerful bond. I’m curious, with all those challenges that you were talking about, clearly, you find a lot of joy in your work. Tell us about some of the feelings that you have about saving this animal.
Marker: It is absolutely amazing. I have worked with so many of the wild cheetahs — nearly 2,000 — and my work is to try and put them back out into the wild. With that, we need to make the wild, wild. And so, we work, again, with these communities to develop conservancies and community-based programs, and I cannot express what it feels like to actually see a cheetah cub go free back out into the wild.
But then raising these orphan cubs — we also have a center up in the Somaliland, where there’s illegal wildlife pet trade —
and there we have a lot of cubs coming in that have been confiscated, poached from the wild, and we have to put a lot of effort into keeping them alive, and then rehabilitate the animals and put them back in the wild. We have to develop a place where the animals can live.
That’s where the people on whose land the cheetah lives develop empathy for these animals and the wildlife, and help them learn to get out of the poverty cycle. Many of the people where the cheetahs are living are in very arid landscapes and are very, very poor.
So, I try to get everyone to see the cheetah through my eyes. I not only have gone through its past, but I see its future. The future is in our hands as humans, and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to save this species for future generations.
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