“Thousands of years of inbreeding has made them weak. . . . (But) if you leave them alone in the wild, they survive.” Laurie Marker

Nothing in this world moves like the cheetah: from zero to 70 kilometres per hour in just four seconds, 7.5 metres per stride, their feet barely touching the ground, speeds reaching a jaw-dropping 125 kilometres per hour.

But cheetahs — the world’s fastest land animals — are also speeding toward their extinction.

Not if Laurie Marker can help it.

The founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund is sitting in a corner room on the 34th floor of a tower in downtown Toronto. Marker, 61, has just wrapped up a lecture about how mining companies in Africa can coexist with wildlife, including cheetahs.

She is far from her home in the wilds of Namibia, where she raises abandoned baby cheetahs and has doubled their population — the only country that can boast of this feat.

“It wasn’t easy … and we still have much to do,” says Marker.

Once abundant in Asia and Africa, cheetahs are now found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. From 100,000 in 1900 to less than 10,000 today, their descent has been swift. They are fast but fragile, and bigger, stronger hunters such as lions and leopards often steal cheetah kills. That forced cheetahs to abandon wildlife refuges and protected areas in favour of populated ranchlands where they would attack livestock. In turn, farmers would shoot them.

Until a few years ago, about 900 cheetahs were being trapped and killed annually in Namibia. Now, that’s down to maybe a handful.

It’s all because of Marker — and a few hundred dogs.

When Marker heard about farmers shooting cheetahs, she began meeting with them, looking for ways to stop the killings. “I knew I could not convince them to save the cheetah if I couldn’t help them with their livelihoods,” she says.

In 1994, she started the Livestock Guarding Dog program, which raises Anatolian Shepherd and Kangal dogs to help Namibian farmers protect their livestock. The two breeds are intelligent, protective and imposing, and have been bred over thousands of years to guard livestock. They drive away most predators, including cheetahs.

When cheetahs approach livestock, the dogs’ bark is enough to make them retreat. Cheetahs don’t like engaging in a fight; these big cats are fast but not bulky or built to brawl. They also know that it they are injured they can’t hunt or take care of their babies. And unlike some of the larger and tougher predators, cheetahs are not territorial.

This program has placed more than 650 dogs with farmers. “It has drastically reduced the killing of cheetahs by farmers,” says Marker.

She and her staff have helped develop similar programs in South Africa, Botswana and Tanzania.

From 1991, when Marker moved to Namibia to work with the big cats, their population has changed. There were 2,000 cheetahs in the wild then, and now there are over 4,000: the largest population of any country.

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But Marker may have never have gone to Namibia if it hadn’t been for a baby cheetah named Khayyam.

The California-born Marker was in her early twenties, working at an exotic animal park called Wildlife Safari in Oregon, when she first saw and fell in love with cheetahs. But no one could answer her questions about how to breed them in captivity or why they had such short lifespans in captivity: just five or six years.

She studied the 10 cheetahs at the Oregon park and began developing a successful captive breeding program that was the first of its kind.

Marker first visited Namibia in 1977 to see if Khayyam, a captive-born cheetah, could be taught to hunt in the wild, and that’s when she learned how hundreds were being killed by farmers every year.

For years, she kept going back and kept asking questions. Finally, in 1990, she started the Cheetah Conservation Fund and relocated to Namibia.

She’s partially solved one problem that beset the cheetahs, but there are more. There is very little genetic diversity among these big cats: all cheetahs in the wild descended from about 10 that survived the ice age 10,000 years ago. “Thousands of years of inbreeding has made them weak,” she says.

Then there is climate change. Cheetahs, Marker says, already live in some of the hottest, most arid regions of the world. As it gets hotter, the grass becomes less palatable for their prey, which moves to greener pastures. That, in turn, makes food hard to come by for cheetahs.

“Cheetahs have a lot of problems,” says Marker. But although their genetics can’t be changed, “we can stop people from killing them. If you leave them alone in the wild, they survive.”

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