International Cheetah Day on December 4th celebrates the Earth’s fastest land animal.
These magnificent cats are vulnerable to extinction in the wild; only about 7,000 cheetahs are left in the world.
Dr. Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) in Namibia, has dedicated the past 30 years of her life to keep cheetahs living free and in the wild—she’s much like the Jane Goodall of cheetahs.
Correspondent Laurie McAndish King visited with Dr. Marker and the Cheetah Conservation Fund’s Research and Education Center in northern Namibia.
King learns about cheetahs, CCF’s Guardian Dog program, and how managing wildlife, range land and livestock as an ecosystem helps to minimize predation. Dr. Marker’s successes inspires programs around the world wherever humans and wildlife interact. Come along and join Laurie McAndish King, reporting from Namibia….
TRANSCRIPT:
The sun is hot and bright here, and desert grit dusts my lips. A pale expanse of sand, broken up by clumps of vegetation, stretches out toward towering cliffs on the horizon.
Suddenly, not 50 feet away, a cheetah rises from the sand. She was well camouflaged, her dusky coat the same color as the earth, and now she flies by so fast that I literally see only a streak. Like a sleek muscle car, this feline can accelerate from zero to sixty in just three seconds.
In fact, cheetahs clock in at up to 70 miles an hour; they’re our fastest land animal. Sure, they can only maintain that speed for a few seconds, but these are nevertheless seriously cool cats: They spend only about 12% of their day moving around; the rest of their time is just hanging out. And they’re the only big felines that purr like house cats—only they’re a lot louder.
Cheetahs are also one of Africa's most endangered big cats, with only about 7,000 remaining in the world today.
I’m in Namibia, the cheetah capital of the world, to learn more about them. And there’s no better place to do that than here at the international Cheetah Conservation Fund’s research and education center near Otjiwarongo.
Founder and Director Dr. Laurie Marker set up the Cheetah Conservation Fund , or CCF, in 1990 when Namibia gained independence. She’s like the Jane Goodall of cheetahs, devoting her life to studying these animals and to creating a place where they can live, free and in the wild. The cheetah I just saw was not in the wild, though.
It lives here at CCF permanently, along with twenty-some other cheetahs, none of which would survive if they had to fend for themselves. Most were orphaned before they were old enough to learn to hunt; one had been kept as a pet for five years.
These “Ambassador Cheetahs” are the public-facing part of Cheetah Conservation Fund’s research and education center—visitors can watch them eating, exercising, or lounging in the desert scrubland. The one I saw was getting in some exercise, chasing a lure—like the ones used in greyhound racing—around a half-acre paddock.
These cheetahs are wonderful to watch—their agility and ability to accelerate are even more impressive than their speed.
But, as Dr. Marker learned early on, a big part of cheetah conservation involves human interaction. Thirty years ago, the biggest threat to cheetahs in Namibia was farmers. “At that time,” Dr. Marker says, “farmers were shooting 800 to 900 cheetahs each year, because they thought cheetahs were killing their livestock.”
Dr. Marker suspected the threat was more perceived than actual. She needed to find out whether cheetahs really were killing large numbers of livestock. So CCF trained dogs to detect cheetah scat, then obtained scat from various areas and tested it to find out what the big cats had really been eating. Turns out, they weren’t eating much in the way of farmers’ goats or sheep.
It also turned out that simple reassurance about the cheetahs’ preferred diets was not enough to calm the farmers, and that multiple steps would be required to convince them to stop shooting and trapping the big cats.
So the CCF began working with farmers on developing healthier herds, with regular vaccinations and de-worming, wound care, managing breeding, and sheltering young, sick, and injured livestock that might be enticing to predators.
The CCF also began their acclaimed Guardian Dog Program: They train Anatolian shepherds to act as guardians for sheep and goat flocks. These dogs are big—they weigh up to 180 pounds—and their bite—at 734 pounds per square inch—is even more powerful than that of a lion. The dogs position themselves between the herd and the potential predator, and that’s pretty much that. No one wants to have to go through an Anatolian shepherd to get to dinner.
Over the decades, CCF has provided and trained more than 800 dogs. They supply full veterinarian services and check in on the dogs at 3 months to confirm they are bonding with the herd, at 6 months to ensure they are doing their jobs, and at 12 months for vaccinations and to confirm they are not malnourished or mistreated. There are currently nearly 200 guardian dogs in the field, with demand for even more.
All this work has made a big difference: Total livestock loss—from all sources—is down 80 to 100%. Farmers no longer feel the need to exterminate cheetahs. And CCF has developed successful, systems-based conservation efforts that can be replicated in other areas with other threatened species.
If you’d like to learn more about cheetah conservation, visit the Cheetah Conservation Fund online at Cheetah.org. The organization welcomes in-person guests and volunteers, and has an intern program. This is Laurie McAndish King reporting from Namibia.
· Cheetah.org (Cheetah Conservation Fund--CCF)
· CCF on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ccfcheetah/
· International Cheetah Day: https://www.nationaldaycalendar.com/international/international-cheetah-day-december-4
· International Cheetah Day (at the CCF): https://cheetah.org/about/what-we-do/international-cheetah-day/
Hashtags: #cheetah, #InternationalCheetahDay, #DrLaurieMarker #cheetahconservation
