Rescuing Cheetahs, Helping People

By M.J. Prest

Photograph by Cheetah Conservation Fund Namibia

Laurie Marker, a conservation biologist, has dedicated her life to saving the cheetah, one of the most endangered large cats in the world. In 1991, she left Washington for Namibia, home to the largest population of cheetahs living in the wild, to establish the Cheetah Conservation Fund, in Otjiwarongo.

Yet Ms. Marker’s work has been as much about helping the people of Namibia, where 30 percent of the population is unemployed, as it has been about saving cheetahs.

For example, the Cheetah Conservation Fund worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development to create the Bushblok Project. The project employs local laborers to cut down thorn trees that threaten to ruin the cheetah’s natural habitat. The laborers then turn the scrub into clean-burning fuel logs.

Ms. Marker has also worked with local farmers on a financially beneficial alternative to killing cheetahs that prey on livestock. She gives the farmers Anatolian shepherd dogs to scare off cheetahs, instead of trapping or shooting them. She in turn helped to persuade the European Union to allow the farmers to designate their beef as “cheetah friendly” and sell it at a premium price in Europe. She hopes Namibian beef will eventually be sold in the United States as well.

“I make farmers see that it’s economically more profitable for them not to kill cheetahs,” she says.

The Cheetah Conservation Fund relies on donations to finance much of its $1-million annual budget. It employs 60 people who, in addition to their other conservation work, help rehabilitate 50 injured cats each year and prepare them to return to the wild.

Here, Ms. Marker and her tame “ambassador cheetah,” Chewbaaka, survey the Namibian savannah.