Laurie Marker has spent nearly half a century with cheetahs.
Her career began when she moved to Oregon in the early 1970s to open the third winery in the state. She began working at Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon, to help support her business. This move would start a decadeslong career working with cheetahs.
She eventually found the Cheetah Conservation Fund and moved to Namibia to create a dedicated wildlife reserve and research center for these large felines.
Today, cheetahs are considered to have a vulnerable status, with less than 7,000 in the wild. Marker joins us to share more on her life and work with the fastest mammal on the planet, that is racing to extinction.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Laurie Marker has spent about half a century with cheetahs, but she started, it seems, almost by accident. Marker moved to Oregon in the early 1970s to open the third winery in the state. She ended up working at the nearby wildlife safari to help support her business. That’s when she first spent time with cheetahs, work that eventually led her to found the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia and to create a dedicated wildlife reserve and research center for these large, fast and vulnerable felines.
Laurie Marker joins us now to talk about her life’s work. It’s great to have you on the show.
Laurie Marker: Thank you very much. Very nice to meet you and be here.
Miller: So about 50 years ago, you moved to Oregon to open a winery. How did you end up working at what became known as Wildlife Safari?
Marker: Well, I actually brought a dairy goat herd with me. I moved up from Napa and, of course, at that point in time the wine industry was just so new. And I had moved up to be a pioneer of the Oregon wine industry, but I needed a job and my background had been with animals. So I had gone through agriculture school and thought I was going to go into vet school at Davis, and didn’t, and ended up coming in and putting my training into practice. And when I got to the Oregon Wildlife Safari, I said, I just live down the road and I need a job to take care of my business, my background is with animals and here I am. And by the way, I’m going to donate a couple of goats to you. [Laughter]
Next thing you knew, I was working in the veterinary clinic and the cheetahs came under my care.
Miller: What animals did you work with there?
Marker: Oh my gosh, everything. The Wildlife Safari – and you should all come down there – is a drive-through wild animal park and globally recognized for the work, of course, in cheetahs, but we had over 400 species of wildlife. And I took care of all of them basically.
Miller: Do you remember the first cheetah that you encountered there?
Marker: Oh yeah. Oh my gosh, yes. [Laughter]
Miller: Had you, I mean, how much time had you spent around a truly big cat before that?
Marker: No, nothing. No, no, no. I was a horseback rider though. So, horses are very similar to cheetahs in many ways.
Miller: Really. I would not assume that.
Marker: Flight versus fight. So horses are a flight animal. They will run away if they get scared, and cheetahs are very similar. Cheetahs are not aggressive animals. They’re fast, but for that speed everything of power has gone away, so they don’t have big teeth, big claws. Their claws are dog-like, so there’s a lot of similarities.
Miller: But I would have thought that they run really fast so they can catch things to eat them.
Marker: They do, but they’re a sprinter. So very fast, very short distances. But they trip their prey and then they’ve got short claws, the teeth, they go into a strangulation hold. That’s how they hunt. They’re fascinating.
Miller: So out of all the animals, 400 species you said there at Wildlife Safari that you were working with and working among, what drew you to cheetahs?
Marker: Well, it was fascinating because I had never seen a cheetah, never even heard of one. And all of a sudden there they were under my care. Oh, if you’ve seen a cheetah, they’re the most beautiful animal on earth, and their eyes! Their eyes just look all the way through you and they hiss, they spat, they purr, they gurgle, they chirp like birds. And with that, they are so fast. And I was just caught and fascinated.
Then I said, “well, I want to know about cheetahs,” and people said, “well, we don’t know very much about cheetahs.” And the director Frank Hart said write to people and find out. And so I wrote to people around the world, and people would write back and they’d say, “when you find out about cheetahs, let us know.”
Miller: Why did people know so little at the time about cheetahs?
Marker: Because they had been revered for 5,000 years. People had them as kings, emperors and princes, had actually loved them to near extinction. But with that, zoo people didn’t know anything about them because they didn’t breed well in captivity. There were very few of them in captivity and all of a sudden here they were in our care. So people said, they have short lifespans, they don’t breed well, good luck. And we were losing them in the wild. So when you find out something about cheetahs, let us know.
Miller: Can you tell us about a cheetah cub named – I don’t know how to pronounce his name – Khayam?
Marker: Khayam. Very important cheetah of which there are now … I think there have been two other cheetahs or three down at Wildlife Safari because they’ve kept her name going. But Khayam, actually, I always say she gave me a vision and showed me the path, but I raised her. She’d been born at the wildlife safari, and I raised her as a cub, and my job was to go to Africa with her and find out if a captive born cheetah could learn how to hunt – which is why I ended up in Namibia. And her parents had actually come from Namibia and back in those early days in the ‘70s, zoos were just starting to cooperate together and we thought that we were gonna breed animals, maximize genetic diversity in our breeding programs in zoos, and we could restock the wild with the animals that we were saving in zoos. But really, nobody had ever gone back over to the wild to figure out what that looked like and how you go about doing it.
So, that was my pioneering research, and I took Khayam over to Namibia in the middle 1970s and ended up there for several months. I taught her how to hunt...
Miller: How do you do that? How do you teach a captive-born cheetah cub how to hunt? And people should know this. You’re a human.
Marker: I am human. I am. Well, I don’t know. I feel like I have a lot of cheetah blood going through me, but… [Laughter]
Miller: Do you? OK, we can talk about that as we go.
Marker: Not fast. But cheetahs, yeah, they have an instinct. When I’d raised her up, I raised her up running free in my vineyard. She chased around with my dog. We then put her on a mechanical lure and then she was running behind a fast vehicle. She was in excellent condition.
So again, my life’s come full circle because about three years ago we restocked India with cheetahs after they’d gone extinct 75 years ago. So teaching a cheetah how to hunt is something that I’ve actually perfected. And Khayam taught me what I needed to do to learn this, but it’s an instinct. Running after a moving object is an instinct. A cheetah needs to be in good mental and physical condition. Khayam was both. And then sitting at a water hole, all of a sudden it’s like, well, there’s an antelope there. Yeah, she’d look at me and go, well, what do you think? I’d say, well, that one looks pretty good, small enough size.
Cheetahs hunt small antelopes like springbok, steenbock, diker, Thompson’s gazelle, around a 65, 70-pound animal. They will go after rabbits, hare as well, but … So I’d kind of give her a nudge, and all of a sudden she’d start chasing, looking back at me like, Mom, is this what I’m supposed to do? And yes indeed, she picked up going after the chase.
Miller: Including knowing how to trip them?
Marker: Well, when you’re chasing something, you wanna trip. She’d grown up with my dog. And I used to travel around here in Oregon. I mean, after coming back and teaching this cheetah how to hunt, I’d go to schools and we’d run Khayam at many of the school-like tracks. This has changed. You know, this is back in the ‘70s. You don’t do that anymore.
Miller: You would take a full grown cheetah to a track with little kids around and…
Marker: They’re up in the bleachers. But everybody in Oregon knew Khayam. I mean, I used to take Khayam to the state capitol, and they’d say – I was on a few different boards here – “oh, well, yeah, you can come to the meeting,” which I was on the committee, “but you got to bring Khayam along as well.”
Miller: So you’d go inside the capitol in Salem?
Marker: Oh, she was well known. She was a very, very famous Oregonian. But she had learned how to hunt, so she’d run after my dog, and of course she played trip with my dog and my dog would turn around and bark at her. She learned how to be very gentle, but when she was out running in the wild, she learned how to trip the antelope. And then you have to go to the threat but blah blah blah blah blah. But she learned how to hunt.
So that then started me on a whole variety of other programs and I eventually moved from Oregon…
Miller: To Namibia.
Marker: And ended up in Africa.
Miller: What’s the mission of the CCF?
Marker: The mission is to keep cheetahs living free and in the wild. So our programs really are based on science. As a scientist, we have used radio telemetry to find out how cheetahs move, a lot of biomedical, understanding their genetics, the overall health of them. But then most of the cheetahs that are left, and there are only 7,000 cheetahs left in the world today, are found outside of protected areas. They’ve got huge home ranges, about 800 square miles, and with that, most of the reserves and protected areas aren’t large enough. So cheetahs are found outside of protected areas and they get pushed out by their large carnivores: lions and hyenas who steal their food, kill their young.
So they’re on land where there’s oftentimes humans and their livestock. There is a lot of wildlife there as well, but with that we teach humans how to live in harmony with nature and wildlife. So we have a program we call Future Farmers of Africa. I grew up as a Future Farmer of America and I’m a goat farmer. I was actually a goat judge around the United States. But from that, we teach people how to take care of their livestock – so good livestock management, good grazing land management and then good wildlife management. And from that, then you can actually live in harmony.
We’ve got school education programs, so we work with about 25,000 to 30,000 school children a year. We’ve developed an entire private reserve which is about 160,000 acres backing up onto a national park, where we’re part of what’s called a conservancy where communities are working in harmony with the government to manage our wildlife and our natural resources. So it’s an integrated system. Livestock and wildlife can live together.
Miller: It’s interesting as you’re describing this. What came immediately to mind is what seems to me to be an analog of wolves and ranchers saying, yes, conservationists, you’re talking about the importance of an apex predator, but it’s just cutting into my bottom line. They’re eating my cattle. They’re eating my sheep, my whatever. How similar do you see these issues?
Marker: Well, very much. And that’s why coming from Oregon, I mean, my eyes are wide open. I love my livestock, but I love wildlife and we developed programs, some of which actually came from Oregon, [like] the livestock guarding dog program. We actually have, for the last 30 years, been breeding and placing livestock guarding dogs with farming communities, and teaching farmers to know that they don’t have to lose their livestock. Livestock loss to a rancher and a farmer is oftentimes in their hands of changing that. Ranchers don’t like to hear that, but the truth is that they play a role in the loss of their livestock. We can manage our livestock so that we don’t lose it.
For small stock, using a livestock guarding dog, we use Anatolian shepherds or Kangal dogs, which is an ancient breed over 6,000 years old. It’s been used in Turkey to protect livestock. And there are about 20 other different breeds of livestock guarding dogs, all from the old world, Europe. But the Anatolian shepherd lives in such a way that it covers vast areas. They’re very, very intelligent and so they’re discerning and they don’t need a human to tell them what to do. We breed them and place them with our small stock, goats and sheep, and they protect the livestock by marking territory and a lot of it is avoidance by predators. Predators don’t want to get hurt and when they hear a dog bark, they know that that herd is protected. We also place these dogs with cattle, calves. And for most predators, it’s the smaller animals, so small stock goats and sheep or the young of the cows. So usually under six months of age is when your most vulnerable cattle are calves.
We have breeding seasons which we encourage so that all your animals are bred at the same time, so your adult animals are more aggressive, but the dogs actually can act as a guardian. They bark loudly and they will fight. Up against a pack of wolves, you need more than one dog. Yeah, probably three is usually what’s recommended by my colleagues in, for instance, Turkey, whom I’ve worked very closely with. And for animals like the cheetah, one will work great against like two to 300 head of small stock goats or sheep.
Programs that we’ve developed in Namibia for 30 years – we publish everything that we do as well – have been used not only here in America but throughout Europe and South America. We can live in harmony with predators, but we don’t often know those tools, and these tools are available. So a lot of what we’ve done is developed good tools to teach people that they can live with predators, because predators are key to, yes, the health of our ecosystems.
Miller: What role do predators like cheetahs play?
Marker: Well, they’re the best hunters in all of Africa. They feed the veld. They’re also nature’s doctors because they weed out the slow, the dumb, the sick and the old. And they keep the wildlife populations healthy. They move populations. You don’t get overgrazing from the wildlife through these movements, so that’s a really important thing. But they also feed the rest of your ecosystem. So, the biodiversity is much greater when you have a predator as your top predator, because they feed everything else.
Cheetahs, for instance, will make a kill, eat rapidly, and then are either be chased off by other large predators who then get to eat, or they eat their fill and they leave. And then you end up feeding a jackal, and if the jackal gets fed, it’s not going to be in your goat yard. It feeds the birds of prey. It feeds all the small insects, other small mammals. So they are actually the feeder and caretakers of our ecosystems.
Miller: We were talking about Namibia earlier, but about 10 years ago, as I understand it, you opened a refuge in Somaliland for cheetahs rescued from illegal trade. What does that mean in the context of cheetahs, illegal trade?
Marker: Well, it’s an illegal wildlife pet trade where these animals are stolen from the wild. They’re poached out of the wild, either their mother’s killed or they’re chased away because cheetahs aren’t that aggressive. You can chase them away, steal the cubs. This is going on in the Horn of Africa, up in Ethiopia, Somalia, Somaliland. And we have set up a base in Somaliland, which is an unrecognized country in the Horn of Africa – a democratic country – and [they have] been a great partner to work with us. It’s the closest distance between Yemen and the Middle East. These cubs are used as a status symbol.
Miller: What are the markets for these cubs?
Marker: The Middle East. So, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., of which those countries now have been working with us very closely on trying to stop the trade, but it’s illegal. And they’ve made very strict laws to stop it. What we’ve done in Somaliland and Ethiopia [is] a lot of training on, what is a cheetah? It is against the law for illegal wildlife trade. With that though, when the animals get confiscated, we’ve had to develop a whole another center up in Somaliland. So we have over 800 acres that have been developed. We have 127 cheetahs that we’ve had to now take care of, just in the last eight years.
Miller: And is the idea … I mean, if these have been domestic cheetahs for their whole lives or for most of their lives, just kept as pets until police came and eventually brought them to you, will you have to take care of them for the rest of their lives? Or can they be released?
Marker: Well, these have come in as cubs, so people are smuggling them through Somaliland to get to the Middle East.
Miller: And then they were intercepted while they were still cubs?
Marker: Yes, but they have come to us usually in really poor condition. For every one cheetah that makes it into the pet trade, four or five of them usually die en route. We’ve now been able to intercept a lot of that and save so many of these animals, but if they make it into the Middle East, again, it’s illegal. The people don’t know how to care for them, so the animals only have a lifespan of maybe a year or two. And then they fall in love with them. They want more. So we’re trying to break all of that.
So we’ve taken the programs we’ve developed in Namibia, for instance, and have put them into place there, [like] a Future Farmer of Africa training program. We don’t have the livestock guarding dogs there, but we have taught them a lot about good livestock management, because the human-wildlife conflict is what’s driven a lot of this trade as well. And there’s so much poverty up in Ethiopia and Somaliland, like Somaliland is the third poorest country in the world, we’re trying to look at livelihood development. We’re teaching them how to better take care of their animals, but also putting conservancies into places, where we’ve now developed conservancies and we’re trying to develop a national park network.
All of this has just been done very, very rapidly because we’ve got to stop that trade. There’s only 500 cheetahs left in the Horn of Africa. Because of our research, we’ve got a genetics lab down in Namibia. We’ve got veterinarians up in both Namibia and Somaliland. We do lots of training, but we’re trying to stop the trade.
But from Oregon, I want to also say that we work very closely with the Oregon State University system and we have interns constantly with us in Namibia. We welcome people to come and do a tour in Africa, in Namibia with us. We’ve got a beautiful, huge national, private reserve in our backyard. We really welcome Oregon to join us and to go to our website which is cheetah.org. Tonight we’re having a fundraising event downtown at the Pearl District, and we welcome people to even come to our event or learn more about what we do. Go on our website cheetah.org because Oregon is a very important partner and part of my family.
Miller: Laurie, thanks very much.
Marker: Thank you very much, Dave.
Miller: Laurie Marker, executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund.
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