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Over the last 100 years, the world has lost about 90% of the wild cheetah population, but for about 35 years, the fastest big cat on the planet has been making a comeback, thanks to the Cheetah Conservation Fund started by University of Nebraska Adjunct Professor Laurie Marker. Marker recently visited Lincoln, and Nebraska Public Media’s Dale Johnson sat down with her and asked what goes into successfully raising cheetahs.
Laurie Marker: Yeah. Well, I think most people think of protection of wildlife in national parks, and one of the things that I have found so interesting with cheetahs, cheetahs don't live in those wildlife parks. They're mostly found outside of protected areas. And with that, they're on the land where there are a lot of humans and their livestock. So a lot of that makes it conducive to all live together, are teaching and working with people on land management, range land management, not over grazing, protecting their livestock and then making sure that there's enough wildlife on the land. And then predators can be a part of that system. And predators play a really important role in the health of ecosystems, because they maintain the top down. For cheetahs, they feed all of the veld because cheetahs will eat rapidly and then leave what they don't eat and feed everything else within the system.
Dale Johnson: Why are cheetahs not in parks? Help me understand.
Marker: Very good question. The main reason is they have such large home ranges. So some of our early research was on how far do cheetahs range, and through our work using radio telemetry, now satellite collars, cheetahs have ranges, home ranges of about 800 square miles. So that's huge. Many of the National Parks are not big enough in Africa, but also in the national parks, they've got the protection of the lions and the hyenas and those larger predators, leopards. They will grow in numbers, and they out compete the Cheetahs. Quite often, they'll steal their food. They often can kill the young. And so the cheetahs have been really pretty much pushed out of these protected areas.
Johnson: There are some animals that are tough to conserve. To bring up the numbers, cheetahs seem to be conservable.
Marker: Because they are the smallest of the big cats. They are an animal that really doesn't eat people. And so a lot of our concerns with humans is that these large carnivores are dangerous, and the cheetah has shifted from being their speed. Because they can go up 70 mph, everything that was dangerous on them actually went away. So they don't have big teeth, and they don't have big, powerful claws. Their claws are semi-non retractable, and they're used like cleats for traction and running. So they're not like sharp and dangerous like a leopard or a lion’s are. So those are kind of the two big reasons, but they also believe in flight versus fight, and so because they don't have all those powerful parts of their body, they are the fast hunter, but they also lose much of their prey to all the other predators by being chased away.
Johnson: I was saddened to learn that cheetahs were extinct for 70 years in India, until your efforts. How is that progressing?
Marker: It is going well, slowly. So the reintroduction of an animal when extinction occurs, takes a long, long time. We're at about two and a half years into this. At this point, we've had six liters of cubs. We've had some losses. We've taken over another reserve just recently. So the process is going to take a long time to be able to see sustainable populations. What we also try to do, where their numbers are low, because there are only 7,000 cheetahs left in the world today, is to try to keep the wild cheetahs living in the wild, trying to maintain those and grow them, because that's a little bit easier, almost, than putting them back out in the wild.
Johnson: Your eyes change. Your face changes. When you talk about cheetahs, you just light up. You've had a delightful day. You spent your day, most of it at the Lincoln Children's Zoo, where there are a couple of cheetahs, Sasha and Zuri, pair of cheetahs that were six weeks old, just little babies when they arrived in May of 2023 from a Wildlife Safari in Oregon. So how are they getting along?
Marker: They're doing great. We watched them run. They have a great cheetah run there. And running cheetahs is good for people to see, but it's also really important for their overall health. So it's a really great exhibit, because cheetahs, if they're just sitting on exhibit, they kind of just lay there. But by being able to run is really important. So we run all of our cats in Africa, where we're based in Namibia, and we've tried to teach everybody how to go about running cheetahs. But not all zoos have enough space, and so I was delighted to see these cheetahs run and exhibit their speed and be able to tell people really what is a cheetah, and seeing it run puts it all together.
Johnson: Well, like cheetahs, this conversation has gone by far too quickly. So Google the best cheetah charity, and you will find Cheetah Conservation Fund. My special guest, Dr. Laurie Marker, I'm Dale Johnson. Thanks for being here, everybody on Nebraska Public Media.