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MALE SPEAKER: So, Happy Earth Day, everyone.
We're very pleased to host today one of the crusaders
for conservation, Dr. Laurie Marker.
She's the founder and executive director
of the Cheetah Conservation Fund.
And she brings over 30 years of experience
to the race to save the cheetah.
Dr. Marker has implemented a variety of conservation efforts
in Namibia, ranging from livestock-guarding dog programs
to bush block to save the prey.
Dr. Marker is also going to talk a little bit about her latest
book which was published just yesterday,
"A Future for Cheetahs."
It's a large format book, chronicling cheetahs
in the wild and it features photography by Suzi Eszterhas.
And so, we'll have some time for Q&A at the end.
But without further ado, please join me
in welcoming Laurie to Google.
Thank you.
LAURIE MARKER: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, it's great to be here.
And Earth Day, especially.
This is like the 44th year of Earth Day.
Anyone remember the first one?
Yeah, I know.
I do, too.
But that's good.
I was, then, also on a Google Hangout today,
which was kind of neat, talking about kind
of the two polar opposites-- the polar bears
and the cheetah, both iconic species.
And both-- most people don't realize
how climate change is affecting animals like the cheetah.
But we are talking about climate change as well.
And for cheetahs, it's all about living in harmony with them
in Africa.
So we have to figure out how to live and flourish
with cheetahs.
Everyone knows that the cheetah is the fastest land animal.
And we do have a cheetah that you're
going to meet here a little bit later.
But just to talk about it.
You'll see it as it's walking and I
want you to just think a bit about how special they are.
But they're aerodynamic and built for speed.
Today, the world's about speed.
However, there's nothing that can equal a cheetah.
And it's on the earth.
There are only about 10,000 of them left.
So they are very special.
But they're the most specialized of all the 37 species of cats.
So we'll talk more about the cheetah
when it comes out a little bit later.
But we'll talk a little bit about, you know,
being an icon of speed.
Because they're so beautiful.
And if we lose them, the pronghorned antelope
becomes the next fastest land animal.
Although it's beautiful as well, it's
got not quite the same iconic vision as that of the cheetah.
Fast like a pronghorn.
Well, the pronghorn is fast because the cheetah actually
used to live in North America.
And predators and prey play a very key role living together.
And we always talk about cheetahs
as being a very important part of ecosystems.
Ecosystems keep us all alive.
And predators are something that we think, around the world,
should actually go away.
And most of our predators are vulnerable to extinction today
because of the way we view them.
However, when we have top predators,
we have a healthier ecosystem with more biodiversities.
And cheetahs play a very key role
in this in the grassland ecosystems.
With only about 10,000 cheetahs remaining in the world,
what's happened to them?
We've lost 90% of our cheetahs in the last 100 years.
The area on this map here that is darker brown
is the area where cheetahs are found today.
So they're living in very small numbers, fragmented
through a continent that is huge.
In the last 50 years, we've lost about 16 countries
where cheetahs are living.
The cheetah was found in India and became extinct in the '50s,
in the Middle East in the '70s.
The last of the Asian cheetahs is found in Iran
where there are only about 60 cheetahs.
Cheetahs are an animal that don't do well
in protected game reserves.
So although we think of Africa as being a very large continent
with lots of wildlife, they don't do well
because lions and hyenas steal their food, kill their young,
and push them out of these systems that
are not very large.
But that's where they are the kings of the game reserves.
And so, cheetahs get pushed out, they're
in conflict with humans and livestock.
And throughout Africa, we've got human populations
that are growing.
And most people who are living in sub-Saharan Africa
have lots and lots of livestock.
And the poor, rural livestock farmers
often don't take very good care of their animals.
And if a cheetah or other predators
catch one of the livestock, then they're oftentimes killed.
So that's the issues that we're actually facing.
So these pictures here show a bit about what that looks like.
Up in the very top on your right is actually cubs.
And we've got a very bad illegal trade
going on today in Northern Africa going into the Middle
East for the pet trade.
I live in Namibia.
Namibia is a democratic country.
It's about 2 and 1/2 times the size of California.
Very, very arid where we're very prone to drought cycles.
And with this, it's now the last large habitat for cheetahs.
We have about 3,000 to 4,000 of the remaining 10,000 cheetahs.
We've doubled that population in the 25 years
that I've set up the Cheetah Conservation Fund.
And our vision is really to see a world in which cheetahs live
in harmony and flourish in coexistence
with people and the environment.
And that's, I think, a big thing today
is that we have forgotten how to co-exist.
And the cheetah doesn't live inside
of a square box of a game reserve.
It's made me think for about 40 years about how to save them.
And that's outside square boxes.
And I've had to look at world-changing things.
And it's interesting, how does one actually
go about changing the world?
Google had changed the world.
The cheetah is changing the world as well.
Now over a 40 year period of time,
I thought, well, I know a lot about cheetahs.
And I've studied them.
I know more about them then probably
most anybody knows about any living species.
And yet, with this, just knowing about them
is not going to save them.
So I set out about 25 years ago and moved
to Namibia, a country I'd traveled to a lot,
to try to find out why people were killing cheetahs.
When I got to Namibia, farmers were
killing about 1,000 cheetahs a year.
It was indiscriminate.
They saw a cheetah, it was a perceived threat
to their livestock, they would catch them in capture cages,
and once caught, they would usually shoot them.
But why?
Was it because they were causing a problem to their livestock?
We primarily found that it was because they
were perceived as vermin.
And that's the same thing that we, globally,
think of all of our predators.
So I think this is probably something
that it's not just our African farmers
but it's farmers worldwide.
That the value of wildlife, the value of predators,
is really limited.
Farmers, ranchers, the world really looks our livestock.
But where do wildlife fit in?
What is the value of conservation?
Our research in our Cheetah Conservation Fund
really deals with the cheetah survival.
And we're research-based conservation program.
So we learn about the animal, we do conservation,
and we do a lot of education.
The cheetah is an animal that is very unique.
It lacks genetic diversity.
And genetic diversity keeps us all healthy.
And the diversity of our genes is very important.
But the cheetah actually went through a population bottleneck
about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago,
leaving them very, very, very genetically the same.
So there's a whole aspect of biology
that we need to understand, basic biology.
So we studied the cheetah in that aspect.
We also then look at how to stop farmers from catching cheetahs.
Stopping the human/wildlife conflict,
which has become a model for predators and people
living together around the world.
And then, looking at livelihoods.
Because if you're a poor, starving farmer,
you really don't want to have cheetahs
or other predators coming in.
And I always like to ask people, how many people really would
like to be a poor, starving farmer in an arid-type area
in Africa?
Anybody?
Usually I find nobody.
And I live as a farmer in Namibia
because when I moved there, it was actually
to find out how to live in harmony with the people.
We have a very large research area.
And we do a lot of work using Google Maps and using GIS.
And we study maps everywhere.
So maps are a very big part of our life.
This is just a little map with a bunch of dots on it
that says the red dots were where
we went and rescued cheetahs.
The black dots are when I went door-to-door and talked
to farmers to find out everything
there was about their ecosystem.
And that area that's in there is about the size of California.
This area that's pulled off to the side is our research area.
And all those other dots that are over there
are where we use radio telemetry.
And we now use satellite collars.
So every little dot that's there is
where we know a cheetah has gone.
And then we go out into those areas
and we understand more about how it overlaps
with the farms and the farmers and where the wildlife is.
And understand why the cheetah went to those dots.
Our biomedical is world-renowned for the work that we do.
And I just want to put this in perspective.
We're in the middle of nowhere.
And we've developed a research center
that is about 25 miles down a dirt road.
And with that, we have to make our own power,
our own electricity.
We've got solar panels.
We're trying to go into biomass power.
We have a generator.
We have to make our own water, which
means we have to pump it from nowhere in the ground
because we're in a very arid area.
So our bore hole's about 200 meters deep.
But with that, we've developed a very sophisticated research
center.
I was trained to work out of the back of my truck
but I thought, you know, it would
be a lot easier if I could have a few amenities.
And so I developed a little veterinary clinic.
And we have a genetics lab.
And this is where we process our samples.
And we study and learn more about the cheetah and many
of the other aspects of the overall health of the cheetah.
Understanding the cheetah really revolves
around trying to deal with large landscapes.
And so as kind of Google mappers-- as I just
think of your mapping program-- what
does really a large landscape feel like, look like?
For a cheetah-- cheetahs cover areas
of about 800 square miles.
That's a couple male.
A female my cover a larger area than that with her cubs.
That's huge.
And they live in very low density,
over very, very large areas.
So when I talk about what it looks like to save the cheetah,
I'm not saying a farm.
I'm talking about a continent.
So here's one of the radio collars that we use.
These are satellite collars.
And they're really cool.
So we program them and then put them on.
They have a lifetime of about three years.
But you program them and then they have a drop off.
And so, as they drop off, you've collected all this information
via satellite.
Of course, we map it all out.
We know where the cheetahs are.
We primarily like to get data about every hour on the animal.
And as we start learning more about it,
we can change that to go maybe four or five times a day.
And then it uploads-- in the beginning,
if we're putting a cat out-- daily.
And then, as we start learning more about the animal
and it settles down, we then start going to like every week.
So our information is very extensive.
Each one of these collars is about $5,500.
But they have a very long lifespan
and they're very important to us for the research that we do.
Our ecology is very critical.
Again, kind of a complicated map here,
but this is what a cheetah's home range would look like,
over here.
And each one of these little squares
right here is about 10,000 acres.
So again, in looking at what that looks like,
that's about 20 farms.
And that's a typical home range for a cheetah.
They live in low densities.
There is overlap and they have avoidance
that goes on through scat and scent marking.
And so we actually study the scent
marking by putting up camera traps.
And these are different areas where we put these traps.
This is about a 300 square mile area.
And we find about 12 cheetahs that live in those areas.
And we conduct this study using camera traps.
And Matti Nghikembua is our chief ecologist
up at the top having one of our camera traps there.
And it's allowed us to understand more
about the distribution and the density of cheetahs.
We see about four to five cheetahs
per 1,000 square kilometers.
Again in what their home range looks like,
male cheetahs live together their whole life.
Male cheetahs form what are called coalitions.
They're brothers, they love each other,
and then they will form a territory, or a home range,
which is about 400 square miles as they get smaller.
And then with that, females cover multiple male home
ranges.
This is different, like, then any
of the other large carnivores, or cats.
Because usually it's the males covering multiple females.
Well, cheetahs are a little bit different.
Cheetahs have what's called mate choice.
So they'll find which male groups that they want
to go mate with.
They also have a matriarchal society.
So within the female's home range,
her daughters would stay, she be in where her sisters are.
In their huge-- and yet, they do overlap,
but there's a lot of sociability that
goes on in these very large home ranges.
The other thing that we do is-- when
we were able to collect so many cheetahs
but fortunately we stopped the farmers
from catching so many-- we still want to know more about how
cheetahs are living out there.
So we've employed scat dogs-- or detection dogs.
So all four of these people and dogs up here are ecologists.
Stephanie is one of our handlers and trainers of the dogs.
And all three of those dogs are trained to go
find cheetah scat.
You say, "go find" and the dog goes off
with a collar on it that also maps
where it's going, that we can download and figure out
how far it takes for the cheetah to go tracking.
And they have quite a good sense of scent.
And they find the scat, they sit, and then we come over
and we can collect the scat.
And then we can take it into our genetics lab.
And we have a very lovely genetics lab.
We are one of the few places in Africa--
outside of a couple of the major cities-- that
actually has a genetics lab.
And our gene sequencer was donated to us
by Life Science Technologies, which is also a San Francisco
Bay company.
And we're very proud to have our sequencer.
And these are two of our geneticists--
Fabiano just finished his Ph.D. A few months ago
and Anne is our chief geneticist that runs our laboratory.
We bring in a lot of Namibian and international students,
a lot from throughout Africa that
want to come in and learn about genetics.
But our Namibian students as well
are trying to learn much more.
Because we really do need to train our next generation
of Africans into being very good scientists as well.
And that's something that we haven't
done a lot with for the years.
But as we take the scat in and overlap it with our camera
traps, we can understand a little bit more
about those individual cheetahs--
understand their genealogy, their lineages
through the scat.
And this picture here shows the differences.
So this picture is three.
And there's another different cheetah up there.
And this is one of the master's projects-- one of our master's
students from Namibia who's actually
looking at identifying and comparing
the different pictures with that of our scat
that we're collecting.
And it's a very important part of understanding
the overall ranges of the cheetahs.
We use dogs in another way, too.
So we try to find the best use of many of our friends.
But since Africa is full of ranchers or farmers--
livestock farmers is what we call them--
they all have livestock.
And if the livestock gets caught by predators
then the predators are killed.
So about 15 years ago, we brought in a breeding group
of Anatolian Shepherd and Kangal dogs, which
is a very large breed of dog.
And we now breed the dogs and we donate them to the farmers.
The puppies are actually placed when
they are about 10 weeks of age.
And we then follow the puppies-- working with the farmers--
to train the farmers in how the dogs are working.
The dogs have been us for about 5,000 years through Turkey.
And they're an amazing breed of dog.
They bark loudly.
They act as a guardian and not a herder.
And they protect the flocks, primarily through actually just
being there.
And the predators don't want to get hurt.
They don't want to come in.
And listening to this large dog bark,
the predators know that there's something there
that's actually protecting them.
And it was exciting, on Sunday, we just
had a litter of 10 puppies born.
So it was a fun day for my staff over in Namibia.
It was my favorite dog so I'm sorry to have
missed her birthing.
But when I get back in about a month,
the puppies will be still another month
to go before we actually will be placing them.
So we've placed nearly 500 of the dogs.
And as we place them, they don't get
to just get played with by the kids.
But this often helps the kids that
then can go off to schools.
Because throughout Africa, most of the time,
the children are the ones that are
herding the family's livestock.
And again, this is one of my next questions,
if you were that age or your children are that age,
would you want them out protecting your livestock?
And what happens when the leopard comes?
And most of the kids say, do you want to be out there?
And the kids go, no.
Where would you go?
We'd run back home.
So then, what would happen to your livestock?
The leopard would probably eat it-- or the cheetah.
So by having the dogs out there, the dogs
grow up and become guardians, the kids can go to school,
the livestock's not killed, and the system then can work.
So those are the kinds of things that we
work on training in programs that we
call Future Farmers of Africa.
Africa's also a place where we all eat lots of meat,
because meat's about the only thing there is to eat.
Now when you live in an arid environment
and there's not very much water, and most of the rural people
carry their water miles on their donkeys or on their own backs
to try to get their water to their villages.
And therefore, you can't really grow anything.
And that's why people eat so much meat.
And that's why we have so much goat and cattle.
And that's why our landscape is overgrazed.
With that, then, we started looking at the health of people
and thought, well, you know, maybe
if they learned that they had a couple of their goats,
and maybe with those goats they could learn how to make cheese,
and they could figure out how to go about doing this even
without electricity, that perhaps it could help them
and their children have a better health.
So we set up the Dancing Goat Creamery.
And the concept with the dancing goat
is the fact that the goats can dance because they're protected
by livestock guarding dogs which are saving cheetahs.
So there is a method to some of the madness that I have.
These are my staff-- Chapa helps manage our small stock,
Sharine in the middle is our main cheese maker,
Chapa has gone through University of Namibia
as an agriculture major.
Sharine is basically illiterate.
And yet is the best cheese maker I think there is in the world.
Hanlie helps me in all of our cooking aspects
and manages the dairy.
She's also a pastry chef.
It's very good.
Big picture.
So I want to talk about this big landscape
and what it's going to take to actually have large landscape.
Our backyard, which is on the other side of the Waterberg
National Park-- which is this big mountain
up there-- which is a wildlife park owned by the government.
And our land borders it.
We have about 100,000 acres of land.
We got a very large piece of land
that we manage as part of the Waterberg Conservancy.
And it's a buffer to the wildlife park.
Around us, then, is an area called the Greater Waterberg
Landscape.
We work with are our neighbors in managing our wildlife
and natural resources in an integrated system where we have
enough grazing land, good wildlife,
our livestock is protected.
And then with that, predators can play a role in the system.
We also not only have cheetahs in this area,
we also have wild dogs, which are one of the most endangered.
Of all the canids, they're one of the most endangered predator
there is in the world.
So two iconic animals living in this landscape.
Within this whole community is also
a group of people which are called the Herero.
The Herero speaking people from Namibia--
we've got about 12 different tribal people--
but they have a very interesting culture.
The women wear these amazing 25-yard dress,
colonially-looking.
And the weather is about 120 degrees.
So it's very interesting that they wear them.
But they are very much a part of their culture.
The culture is that of the being a cattle farmer.
And yet, there's no wildlife in this whole big circle here.
So what our task has been with that
of the Ministry of Environment and Tourism and the UNDP--
the United Nations Development Program--
is to help change this area over into a landscape that's
going to bring in wildlife.
Change, we hope, the lifestyles and the livelihoods
from just a strictly livestock farming community.
And actually have a mixed wildlife/livestock
going into, for them, some ecotourism.
And allow an area for animals like cheetahs and wild dogs.
So a habitat is very, very important as is prey.
So you cannot have a cheetah or other predators without having
prey.
And without having enough grazing land,
you can't have prey.
And if people are hungry, they will eat all that prey ,
keep the grass for their cattle.
And that's why this balance of this conservancy-type
initiative, which Namibia is very famous for, is important.
But a lot of our habitat is very overgrazed.
And what happened with overgrazing--
that means the cattle, and the goats,
and sheep have taken down all the grasses,
especially when we have a drought
and there's not very much rain.
And then what's happened is thorn bushes have taken over.
So our wildlife is actually changed.
We end up seeing it move.
And it goes into areas where there's more water
and where there are grasslands.
We have an area on our land which
is called the Little Serengeti.
And we're starting to see huge numbers of wildlife species
starting to come back because of the kind of management
that we've been dealing with within our conservancy.
But this habitat has caused a major problem.
And throughout an area, again, about the size of California,
right in here, that area used to be an open grassland.
And it's now thickly thorn bush called bush encroachment.
And our thorns are horrible and long.
And just imagine running through this
or even walking through it.
You can hardly penetrate it.
And the bushes have taken over.
They've got very, very deep roots
that are drinking, each plant.
About 65 liters of water per day.
So it's a form of desertification.
And with that, no grass grows.
So we've taken an area about now--
it's roughly about 26 million hectares of very,
very thick thorn bush that you cannot even get through.
And you can see this cow, she can't find her calf.
With thickened thorn bush, farmers kill more cheetahs
because they can't kill the bush.
And every other predator has a problem.
We've found it's affected our economy by over $100 million
per year by the farmers not being able to farm.
And what we found is that cheetahs, actually,
are scratching their eyes and going blind.
And those animals that are the ones, that 3% that
might be out catching livestock.
So we've actually took on a big problem
is to figure out how to go about dealing
with this bush encroachment issue.
So we started a habitat restoration program,
now it's been about 12 years ago.
I think it was maybe six years ago
we won the Tech Award for the environment,
here, in your area.
And it was quite an honor to be recognized here
in this part of the world for the work
that we're doing over in Africa.
But we are selectively harvesting our bush.
We're part of a Forest Stewardship Council
certification process.
Can I ask how many of you might know what FSC is?
Forest Stewardship Council certification.
Hands, no hands, I see one hand.
It is the highest form of forest protection.
And if we all knew what FSC was, we
could not only with every wood product
that we were dealing with as consumers,
we could be helping a lot of different wildlife species.
including animals like elephants and orangutans.
But for us, we're thinning the habitat
so that we can have more grasslands.
We're putting a lot of people to work.
And from that, we made a little fuel log.
And our little fuel log's coming around.
It's an ecolog, burns with very hot heat
with a very low emission.
But out of that, we're now looking at using biomass.
Again, we've got an area the size of California.
We get about 10 tons per hectare harvest
that we could go into biomass electricity.
Much of this biomass is being exasperated as well by the CO2
emissions that are going on.
Because they are affecting and allowing
the trees to actually grow more, the bushes to grow up more.
So these are what our fuel logs look like.
And we ask people to think about eco-partnering and labeling,
and businesses and business partnering.
And to look at products that might
be well-labeled or certified.
We started a program called Wildlife Friendly.
And we did this in cooperation with several other wildlife
conservation groups that were working with communities, that
were putting people into work that
were helping save endangered species.
So our Certified Wildlife Friendly
is different than organic because for animals
like predators, organic doesn't mean
that you can't use strychnine and kill all the predators
while you're having organic lamb.
So those are things just to think on.
Poaching is a big problem.
And I'd just like to touch basically on this for a minute.
That the illegal trade is going from the northern parts
of Africa.
And they're coming in areas like Botswana,
South Africa, Namibia, taking small cubs.
Primarily, though, from Somali land,
which is pretty lawless up there,
and southeastern Ethiopia, northern Kenya.
And these cats are going up into the Middle East.
And for every one cheetah that might make it there alive,
we probably lose about five or more.
So the cheetah cubs are captured and sold
for a very low amount of money and then usually die.
So they die usually under about three months of age
from diseases or improper diet.
If they make it to two years of age, they are very lucky.
Most of them don't.
They die at that time and then the cubs are gone.
They go back into the illegal trade,
get more of them from the wild, and are sold.
so we're spending a lot of our time up in the Middle East
at this point trying to work with the Sheikhs.
There are some very, very good Sheikhs
who are trying to, actually, help promote
the betterment of the care of these animals.
Just a couple months ago, we were up in UAE.
And actually, a lot of our work also
deals with banking-- bio-banking of blood, ***, tissues--
and we trained over 35 of the veterinarians
at several of the different facilities on how to bank down
the *** of their very rare cheetahs.
Many of these animals-- and these
are at legitimate facilities-- to try to actually help them
more about the overall health of the animals
and train the veterinarians.
Putting cheetahs into the wild is, for us,
the most important thing.
And we have put back into the wild over 600 cheetahs.
We recently are doing a lot in reintroduction work.
There's places like India that wants cheetahs again,
Uzbekistan.
And we're working with those countries
to try to find ways that the cheetah could possibly go back
out into some of these other ranges.
We're keeping them living free and in the wild in Namibia
working in cooperation with other cheetah programs
throughout the cheetah's ranges.
From Cheetah Conservation Botswana
to Cheetah Conservation in Kenya or ACT.
But getting cheetahs in the wild and keeping them there
is all about all these components that I talked about.
This is a special friend of mine.
And he has passed away now a couple years ago.
His name was Chewbacca.
And he was with me for 16 years.
He came in as an orphan.
And his mother had been, unfortunately--
well, he'd been taken from his mom.
And was almost on death's door when I got him.
He was one of my best friends and taught me a lot.
But he also taught people throughout Namibia,
and throughout Africa, about what a cheetah is.
And when a farmer would come and yell
at me about his problems with cheetahs
and Chewbacca would lick his hand and purr to him
and look in his eyes, I won that farmer.
And my job was then to work with him
to find ways that he could live in harmony with the cheetah.
I don't know how come I ended up being a cheetah voice
but I've been doing this for 40 years.
It is the most amazing animal that I know.
All animals are very special.
And yet, it to me tells me the job
that we have to do in spreading the word.
And I thank all of you for coming and listening
to these things that we have to say about the cheetah.
Because it's all about thinking outside of square boxes.
We welcome people to visit us at CCF.
We take interns and volunteers.
Any one of you can come.
We're always looking for more capacity in our clinic,
in our genetics lab, working with us on Google Maps,
in all the different aspects that we do work on.
And we get people from around the world
that do come and work with us.
If you just want to come and visit,
we've got a very nice guest house which is three bedroom.
It's called the Babson House and we welcome guests as well.
But we are an open-to-the-public research center.
So when you're there at our Babson House,
you're right in the heart and soul
of the work that goes on with us.
So I ask everyone to help.
And all of you can help us as well.
By just spreading the word and helping
keep cheetahs living in the wild.
And support the work.
Please spread the word.
Please help buy the book that's out here.
And share it with others because it is a special book.
It's called "A Future for Cheetahs"
because saving the cheetah really
means changing the world.
As I mentioned before, you all have changed the world.
And I know that, today, you could help me change the world
to save more cheetahs as well.
Thank you.
We're going to bring in Barb and Rob.
And we've worked together for 20 years, I bet, huh?
And they have an education center up in Occidental
where they bring their cheetahs to schools.
And they have other cats as well.
Barb's been a teacher for more than 20 years.
And went into helping us spread the word
to help save our wildlife species.
So Themba is going to come in.
And he is four years old next month.
And he was born in South Africa at the De Wildt Cheetah Center.
And cheetahs don't breed very well in captivity.
De Wildt's one of the only places
in the world that's actually done so well.
There's only a handful of breeding centers in the world.
And he was hand-raised.
He's fourth generation-- I think, third generation--
captive born.
And being hand-raised, he's been able to be an ambassador
by coming here to meet all of you today.
And I'll just answer and so we'll just,
you guys get to meet the cheetah and ask questions, so--
AUDIENCE: You mentioned thinking about reintroducing the cheetah
to Uzbekistan, I think you said.
What is their natural or historical northern limit
or their range?
LAURIE MARKER: They were found in Uzbekistan.
They were in China.
So they had a very big range throughout all
of Asia and Africa.
And so they went extinct around the Uzbekistan/Russian
territories in the '80s.
And so that is one of the areas that they were living in.
They've got vast grasslands, also very overgrazed.
They're bringing back their wildlife population.
And the government's got quite a commitment to this.
It'll be years to do.
We hope that we can have enough to put back
when that time comes.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thank you for being here today.
Since you're doing genetic work, the cheetahs
that have been taken into other parts of the world as pets,
are you able to identify where they came from originally,
based on your genetic research?
That's number one.
And then number two is, I know that you were saying that there
was a bottleneck was it 10,000 years ago?
LAURIE MARKER: Yes, 10 to 12.
AUDIENCE: 10 to 12, yeah.
And they were down to, like, 2,000 or something cheetahs?
LAURIE MARKER: Ooh, we don't even know.
AUDIENCE: OK, OK.
I don't know but I'm heard that number somewhere.
LAURIE MARKER: Ask my PhD students.
AUDIENCE: And so, how genetically
different are the ones that are found
in different parts of the world, different parts of Africa?
Are they genetically somewhat different or are
they still pretty much the same?
LAURIE MARKER: They're very pretty much the same.
So the divergence actually occurs over like 100,000 years.
And these look like they may be diverged much less than that.
So there is some division in what
they look-- you know, you can tell one
from one part of the world to the other or Africa--
but they are very, very, very much the same.
And we are trying to help collect that genetic material.
That's why we've gone up into the Middle East.
And we're trying to collect everything
that we can from these animals.
So he's going to walk back and forth.
What Rob has done is he's putting his meatballs down.
And he's going to look at where those are.
Now if you notice those tear marks that run down
from those eyes, the cheetah's spots
are different than all the other spots.
Most everyone sees spots and they are leopards usually.
The cheetahs' got polka dots.
All leopards have are what are called rosettas, which
is a black circle with yellow in the middle.
But those tear marks are what distinguish the cheetah
from any of the other spotted cats.
You can hear his claws on the ground.
Cheetahs are the only big cat that has nonretractable.
Claws-- or they're called semi-nonretractable.
And their claws are used like cleats for traction in running.
And that's one of adaptations that's
helped them run speeds of up to 70 miles an hour.
When they run, their shoulder girdles and hip girdles
are not connected.
And they allows them to have an amazing extension.
And then they've got a very flexible backbone.
And their tail is very long.
And their tail is used as a rudder for balance
to help them not roll over and spin out
at that speed of 70 miles an hour.
A lot of people think that running 70 miles an hour
is just what they do.
But they really are more very acrobatic.
So when they run, they're going side-to-side,
backwards-to-forwards.
And so their tail plays an important role
as does the body build.
He's purring right now, I can hear him.
Cheetahs are the only big cat that does purr.
And they chirp like birds.
They bubble, hiss, spat, growl.
[MAKING CHEETAH NOISES]
Let me see, who else might have a question out there?
As I said, he's four.
Cheetahs have a lifespan in captivity of about 12 to 14.
And in the wild, it's about 8 to 10.
OK?
AUDIENCE: You see them with the handler
and you see them sitting next to you, but they are wild animals.
So you're not supposed to go, "kitty, kitty."
So how tame are they, really?
LAURIE MARKER: Well, these guys have been hand-raised.
So he was hand-raised on a bottle.
The cheetah that I was with was hand-raised
from the time he was 10 days old.
And they are an animal that can be tamed.
And that's why cheetahs are still
one of the few animals that can be used in educational purposes
by legitimate facilities.
Now, they're registered.
And so there's only a handful of facilities in the world that
have cheetahs , number one.
And we've been trying to get that under control so that they
are registered facilities by USDA here in the United States.
BARBARA DICELY: By California Fish and Game,
by the US Department of Fish and Wildlife.
I have many, many, many licenses.
LAURIE MARKER: Yes.
And so, and they're used for education.
So it stops people from just having them as a pet.
BARBARA DICELY: Here in California, it
is illegal to own any wild animal as a pet.
Some of the states, it is still legal.
The laws are changing dramatically
just so people don't have a tiger as a pet.
But in California you can't.
So these are strictly educational outreach
ambassadors.
They are not our pets.
LAURIE MARKER: OK, I've got three questions.
Here is one.
Right here is two.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering with the limited genetic cheetahs
have, have you tried transferring cheetahs
from one of the isolated islands of population
to the others to sort of increase the diversity?
LAURIE MARKER: Well, we have not done that yet
because there's a lot of international laws
that would prohibit that.
Because the governments, you know,
like in Iran, their cheetah is special
and they don't want to mix it with anything,
even though it might save them in the long run.
But we're hoping that intervention through habitat,
education, policies, and politics
will actually help us try to grow the populations.
The work that we've done in 25 years in Namibia
has set a stage and a model for cheetah conservation
throughout Africa.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming.
It's very inspiring.
And I wonder how do you plan to scale up your solution?
And what are the major bottlenecks that you see?
Thank you.
LAURIE MARKER: I love your question.
Scaling up is what my life is all about.
When I first said I needed to go save the world,
people wondered what I was talking about.
So our programs around like Future Farmers of Africa--
so we're trying to partner with other organizations that
are involved, like places like CARE
and other humanitarian organizations who are not
putting wildlife and grazing lands into the landscape.
Promoting programs like our conservancies
are very important.
Organizations like World Wildlife Fund
are very committed to those kinds of big picture thinking.
So as a small organization, what we're trying to do
is to get enough funds to actually scale up.
From our bush harvesting program,
we actually are looking for funding to actually scale it up
into biomass power.
We're trying to get power on our land to start with.
And then show Namibia that we can
power it through our bush harvest.
And then, other places in Africa are
looking at the same kinds of issues
in wanting to have something to do with their habitat.
Habitat restoration is going to be key.
And then looking at livelihood development.
Getting people out of that cycle of being
poor, starving farmers.
I'd love you to help.
BARBARA DICELY: You know, the children as me all the time,
you know, how can we, living in America,
really help cheetahs living in Africa?
And as with most things, it boils down to money.
And if you have, you know-- any kind of donation you can make,
Laurie puts to amazing use.
It goes directly to saving cheetahs in the wild.
AUDIENCE: So I know a lot from watching TV
about how and why dogs fit into human families.
I don't really understand the social--
how does a hand-raised cheetah see the people around it?
Like what does that social structure look
like in the cheetah world?
Do you know what I mean?
LAURIE MARKER: Well, like, right here?
AUDIENCE: Or just in general.
What is their social interaction with other cheetahs
and how do they translate that to human [INAUDIBLE]?
LAURIE MARKER: Is this like an orphaned
cheetah like at our place?
AUDIENCE: No, cheetahs in general, right?
I mean, I think dog socialize well with people
because they socialize well with their kind.
LAURIE MARKER: Cheetahs are very much more
social than what we would think.
And that sociability in the wild is the fact
that females are covering large areas with their cubs.
And so they start with a small area
and grow out and out and out, covering a lot of areas.
They go to these marking trees, these play trees,
they know the scents and smells of the other animals.
So the female's a very important teacher
in how to live out in the wild.
Males will kind of do avoidance through, again, scat and scent.
They might use the same play tree or marking area.
BARBARA DICELY: He says you never
know where those meatballs are going to show up.
LAURIE MARKER: Male cheetahs live, as I said, in coalitions.
And a female's got her cubs for about nearly two years--
18 to 22 months.
Then the cubs stay together until they separate,
males separate from the females and the females have litters.
So it's a very interesting social life.
AUDIENCE: So these guys run 50, 60 miles an hour.
Question, just very practical.
When you want to take him for a run,
do you take him on the 101, the I5?
How does that work?
BARBARA DICELY: We have 22 acres of land.
And what we use is a lure system that
was designed for horse and Greyhound dogs.
So basically, at least twice a week, we
do run our cheetahs to the lure so they
do get lots of exercise.
Their exercising that big heart, those lungs, the muscles
that they really need to be healthy.
LAURIE MARKER: Exercise is very, very important for them.
Yes?
OK.
AUDIENCE: A few years ago, I went
with my wife to Africa, Tanzania,
actually, just looking at all the wildlife.
And it was amazing.
I was there mostly for the cheetahs, actually,
and I was impressed that they seemed kind of lazy.
I kept wanting to see them running after stuff.
Several times we saw them hunting.
But they'd sort of gallop-- like trotting--
and they'd just give up.
Do they not actually do the full out sprints very often?
Maybe we just saw them when they weren't hungry.
LAURIE MARKER: Maybe.
But they will only exert themselves
when they know they have a good chance.
So if they're trotting after it, they're
kind of assessing the situation.
Oftentimes, they trot, they stalk.
A hunt could take several hours.
So yeah.
And then, when they do, it's a burst of speed
that you can hardly even catch it.
It's like, wow, I just was looking
at him laying down here and look at that dust.
How did I miss that?
So it is.
It's amazing.
But like all cats, they are energy storers.
So they will sleep and then hunt as they need.
Cheetahs, actually, will hunt more regularly
than all the other cats.
They like fresh food so they're hunting on a regular basis.
Female with classes, she's on the move all the time.
Female cheetahs are the best.
Male cheetahs are the best.
Uh-oh, I think I'm conflicted here.
AUDIENCE: In your place, do you have
problems with the lions and the hyenas?
LAURIE MARKER: Where we are, because we're
on rural farmland-- and that's why the cheetah is taken on
into this area is that farmers have killed all the lions
and hyenas.
We have leopards.
We have baboons.
Both of those are one of the key problems for the cheetah.
But we've been studying how the cheetah overlaps
with the leopard as well.
And we ended up living with baboons these days, too.
So it's rather interesting how the cycles work.
AUDIENCE: How much do the cheetahs eat?
LAURIE MARKER: Well, in captivity,
let us say that they might eat four or five pounds a day,
an animal this size.
In the wild, then, it would be they
would eat as much as they could as quickly as they could.
So it might be eight to 10 kgs, which is maybe 16,
20 pounds just fast.
And then they're gorged and they might
eat-- if they get to eat that big of a diet,
they might not eat for a couple days.
A female, if she's feeding her cubs, depending
on the size of those cubs, she is hunting and watching.
Her cubs are eating fast and she's
going to get some morsels in it.
Unlike lions-- lions will actually eat first
and the cubs eat last-- a female cheetah will make a kill
and make sure her cubs eat first.
So it's a lot of food that they do consume on a regular basis.
Lean meat.
So of course, the antelope that they're eating
is also very lean.
AUDIENCE: You just said that there's
a difference on how much they eat
in captivity versus the wild.
Does that hurt their chances of reintroduction
if they're not used to gorging themselves
when the food is available as opposed to regular feedings?
LAURIE MARKER: No, because you have
to keep them on a regular diet.
If you go to a reintroduction, if they were orphaned animals,
you would start putting them on carcasses.
So they start learning how to eat carcasses.
And then they fill up and go skinny.
It's fun.
AUDIENCE: I had a question about the Uzbekistan cheetahs.
Where those more genetically similar to the Iranian cheetahs
or to the African cheetahs or what are the issues there?
LAURIE MARKER: Well, we don't know because they're extinct.
We are trying to find out much more
about some of these extinct populations
by collecting, like, samples from the museums.
So they are all so similar that it's
hard to actually see that much differentiation with them.
But it would be an animal that would probably
be much more similar to that the Iranian cheetah,
the Asian cheetah.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned there are about 10,000
in the wild right now.
I'm wondering what a healthy and sustainable population would be
or if you have a target number in mind for that?
LAURIE MARKER: I kind of like 100,000.
That's not that many, necessarily,
throughout the continent.
Then if you kind of look at-- I do a lot of math
and I do a lot of modeling.
You'd have to then look at, if you need-- and I know so much.
So I'm always figuring out how much land
they'd need, how much prey they'd
need, how much grasslands they'd need,
how many cattle are out there, how many people are out there.
How do we actually switch that back into these grasslands
where we've got wildlife and prey?
The people are actually getting a different livelihood
than being poor, starving farmers.
And all the sudden, the people are doing something different.
And yet the wildlife is still maintaining
these grassland systems.
Where you then have elephants and rhinos in the land.
You know, we're looking at this kind of big support
system for a big continent.
And the wildlife are a support system,
it's part of biodiversity.
I'd be real happy if we could double the population
in the next five years or 10 years.
We've doubled the population in Namibia in 20 years
and we're kind of stabilizing it.
But with that, we now need to, I guess--
and we are-- working with the other countries
throughout the cheetah's range in order
to help stabilize those and grow those populations.
But it's all about people.
And so I just keep trying to figure out
ways of helping people.
And wanting them all to love the cheetah.
I mean, wasn't he beautiful?
I know it's not-- I bet you haven't
had a cheetah at Google before.
And on Earth Day.
It's a celebration of Earth Day, 44 years.
And think you.
You all can do an awful lot to just spread the word
and get more people involved in many ways.
And I'm always happy to answer more questions.
And welcome all of you to come down and visit.
Oh, I could, I'd be happy to sign books as well.
Buy books, buy books.
You can also adopt cheetahs online, or adopt a dog,
at our website.
We've got a really nice website so please go to it.
Cheetah.org.
If you have kids in school here and you
want to have the Dicelys come and bring
one of their educational programs, they're just amazing.
And they help support many of us who
have cat conservation programs worldwide.
But I live in an area where-- Namibia's got
like 2.2 million people.
And that's not very many in a very large country.
However, that's why-- we got lots of thorn bushes-- getting
to know people when I come over here from Africa
is really nice.
And I hope that you'll all become part of our family
and let us know who you are and learn ways
that you can actually get involved
in making the world different and better with cheetahs.
So, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]