Dr. Laurie Marker

Dr. Laurie Marker is the Founder and Executive Director of Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF). Dr. Marker was raised on a small farm in California (USA) and grew up riding horses, raising dairy goats and rabbits, and assisting the local veterinarian. Dr. Marker was active in 4-H, Pony Club and Future Farmers of America (FFA), the program that inspired her to create CCF’s farmland management training program for Namibian men and women, Future Farmers of Africa. Dr. Marker studied agriculture in college, and hoped to go into veterinary medicine, but instead specialized in Viticulture (grape cultivation) and Enology (wine science), preparing for a career as a vintner. In 1973, she moved to Oregon with her dairy goat herd and became co-owner of Jonicole Vineyards and Winery and helped pioneer the Oregon Winegrowers Association with the 3rd bonded winery in the state.

To support her business, and get back into her passion for animals, in 1974, Dr. Marker began working with cheetahs and over 250 other wildlife species as the Veterinary Clinic Supervisor and Cheetah Curator at Wildlife Safari, a 600-acre, drive-through park in Oregon and one of the few zoological facilities in the world that had cheetahs. Dr. Marker was captivated by this feline icon of speed and grace and wanted to know more about this amazing creature. Over the next 14 years, she established the most successful captive cheetah-breeding programe in the United States and the third most successful program in the world. At the same time, she completed her Bachelor of Science in Biology at Eastern Oregon State University and became the Director of Education and Marketing for Wildlife Safari in addition to being a Cheetah Curator, but her work with the species did not end there.

Dr. Marker traveled to Namibia for the first time in 1977 with Khayam, a captive-born cheetah she hand-raised, to determine if she could be taught to hunt (rather than this being exclusively a natural instinct). The first-of-its-kind research revealed the answer is yes, however, Dr. Marker also learned that livestock farmers were killing wild cheetahs by the hundreds because they perceived them to pose threats to their livestock and livelihoods. She and Khayam returned to Oregon and looked for help in stopping the killing of wild cheetahs. During this time, she wrote to zoos around the world and asked them about what they could tell her about cheetah. Letters she got back included: cheetahs are declining in the wild, they don’t breed well in captivity, they have a very short lifespan in captivity, and when you learn more about cheetahs, please let us know. This is what has guided her in finding out more about cheetahs.

This would not be her last visit to Africa. For the next decade, Dr. Marker traveled to other cheetah range countries in Africa, finding out what the situation was for the cheetah in these countries and what could be done to help the species.

In the early 1980’s Dr. Marker developed the first North American Cheetah Studbook, a registry of all the cheetahs in captivity to better understand the relatedness of the captive population. She hosted the first captive cheetah meeting in Oregon in 1982, which was the beginning of the Cheetah Species Survival Plan, and she was one of the first Species Survival Plan Coordinators. This later grew to developing the International Cheetah Studbook, a registry of captive cheetahs worldwide, first published in 1988. She continues to manage the Studbook through this day.

At home in Oregon, Dr. Marker began collaboration with researchers from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo and the U.S. National Cancer Institute in 1982 on cheetah genetics and reproduction, where the team discovered the cheetahs’ lack of genetic variation and high reproductive abnormalities. This research began her career to better understand the biology of the wild, free-ranging cheetahs, as their biology and ecology had not been studied.

Dr. Marker moved to Washington DC in 1988 and became the Executive Director for the Centre for New Opportunities in Animal Health Sciences (NOAHS) with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo. By being at the forefront of captive cheetah research, Dr. Marker gained the skills and confidence necessary to take on the challenge of saving cheetahs in the wild.

In 1990, Dr. Marker sold her worldly belongings, accounting for about $15,000, and founded the Cheetah Conservation Fund, the same year that Namibia gained its independence. The following year, she permanently relocated to this new African nation and made the country her home ever since. Under her leadership, CCF has grown from a research outpost into a world-class cheetah research, education, and conservation institution. She began CCF’s Future Conservationists of Africa (FCA) educational awareness programs in schools where over 750,000 students have now gone through one of CCF’s programs. In 2000, the doors of CCF were opened to the public, and now CCF hosts daily tours of its facilities for visitors who travel from all over the world to experience and learn about the cheetah in its natural environment. The Centre today is based on over 156,000 acres of land which includes a private wildlife reserve, a model farm that includes a livestock guarding dog breeding program, goat dairy, creamery, a museum, a registered veterinary clinic, a geneticist laboratory, and biomass technology and research center.

One of the most successful programs Dr. Marker has developed is that of the Livestock Guarding Dog program. In 1994 she imported Anatolian Shepherd/Kangal Livestock Guarding Dogs to Namibia and developed the Future Farmer of Africa (FFA) Training program. The large dogs are bred and placed with farmer’s livestock herds where they guard the livestock. Since its inception to 2022, over 750 dogs have been born and placed in Namibia and programs have developed in other countries including South Africa, Botswana as well as in South America, and the United States. CCFs research has shown an 80 to 100% decline of livestock loss to farmers by cheetahs and other predators with the use of these dogs. To-date, over 45,000 farmers have participated in farmers’ training through FFA.

Over the years, Dr. Marker has brought conservation scientists and government officials from most of the cheetah range countries to help teach them about how to save cheetahs in their countries. Today, many of these ‘students’ are helping run programs in their countries and she is in contact with them regularly. Education being one of the most important aspects of cheetah conservation, she began an intern program in 1994 where today over 300 Namibian interns have conducted 6 -month trainings, and over 3,000 international interns have participated including many master and PhD students. Many of her Namibian Interns are now working in government ministries, from the environment, education and agriculture. And many of her international interns are now running research and NGOs of their own.

Dr. Marker’s creative and highly successful conservation strategies for the cheetah consider the needs of wildlife, livestock, and people, with the goal of restoring natural balance of the ecosystem. In Namibia, Dr. Marker drove the formation of cooperative alliances with CCF’s neighboring farmers to manage rangeland and support large landscapes (conservancies) with healthy biodiversity that includes carnivores. Namibia has stabilized the cheetah population in Namibia through her research, education and training programs and today more cheetahs live in Namibia than any other nation of Earth, and the conservancy system Dr. Marker helped form is recognized as the model among African nations. Because of these achievements, Otjiwarongo, Namibia, is now known as the ‘Cheetah Capital of the World.’

Saving the cheetah though has not stopped in Namibia, where she has helped develop tools to mitigate Human Wildlife Conflict. There are other problems that are linked into the human aspect as most of the world’s cheetahs are found outside of protected areas. This is why Dr. Marker’s programs work so closely with the livestock farming communities. In Namibia, over 90% of the cheetahs are on arid livestock and farmlands much of which has been overgrazed causing habitat loss and rangeland degradation manifesting in the form of thickened thorn bushes, known as bush encroachment. Many of the farmers were killing more cheetahs and predators, as the bush encroachment had reduced their grazing lands and they could not do anything about the loss of their grazing land, but they could do something about the predators which might cause them livestock losses. From her Oregon roots, she had realized that bush chips were a commodity. And after extensive research she developed a Forrest Stewardship Council (FSC) Certified wood harvest program called CCF Bush, of which one of the products produced is an award-winning eco-log called BushBlok. Through their biomass program hundreds of hectares of habitat is being restored annually, and CCF help found the Namibian biomass program.

The illegal wildlife pet trade of cheetahs from the Horn of Africa into the Middle East. In 2018 she took on another major project to help stop the illegal trade of poached cubs from the wild and developed 3 safe houses, and now CCF’s Rescue and Conservation Centre in Somaliland where she is currently caring for over 90 confiscated cheetah cubs. Working with the Somaliland Ministry, cubs are confiscated and CCF cares for them at the same time CCF is training the wildlife department, police force, judges, changing laws, teaching FFA and FCA to local communities and developing the first national park for the country and the first conservancies all to help the local communities from supplying the trade. She has been active in CITES to stop the trade and is developing relationships in the Middle East to help stop the demand for illegally poached cubs.

Over the years many orphan cheetah cubs have come through Dr. Marker’s hands. CCF’s motto to help save the wild cheetahs and she wants every cheetah to live free and in the wild. Coming full circle, from teaching Khayam to hunt in Namibia in the mid-1970, she has continued her work to keep as many cheetahs in the wild as possible including as many orphans as possible. Her rehabilitation program has been very successful with nearly 100 orphaned cheetahs having been put back into the wild, successfully living free, hunting and mating with rehabilitated offspring also reproducing.

Over the past 100 years, the cheetah population has declined from over 100,000 cheetahs to less than 7,000 cheetahs today in 31 populations and 23 countries. The cheetah has gone extinct in over 20 countries during those years. CCF’s work has continued to help bring cheetah back to ranges where they once roamed. One of these projects has included bringing back a cheetah population in India, where the species was declared extinct in 1952. In September 2022 the first cheetahs stepped foot on India soil as a gift of the Namibia government to India under the India Cheetah Reintroduction Project. After several teams from India came to train at CCF, Dr. Marker helped the governments with identifying eight cheetahs to go to India which were selected from some of the wild cheetahs that CCF had radio-collared in areas of Namibia. The project is the beginning of a long-term program between India, Namibia and South Africa.

Saving the cheetah has been Dr. Marker’s mission for 50 years. She says she doesn’t know where the time has gone. And every cheetah she can, she will try to keep in the wild through working with local communities and governments. Her motto is to Save the Cheetah we need to Change the World and this is what her conservation programs are aimed to do. In 2002, Dr. Marker earned her DPhil from Oxford University in the UK with a thesis entitled Cheetah: Biology, Ecology and Conservation Strategies on Namibian Farmlands. Her thesis is considered the baseline for global cheetah research and conservation. Dr. Marker has since published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals and has a number of books to her credit, including A Future for Cheetahs, Chewbaaka, and Cheetahs: A Celebration of Speed and Elegance. In 2017, Dr. Marker was the lead editor and author of the definitive text book bringing together the work of 150 scientists and experts, CHEETAHS: Biology and Conservation.

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