Word: markers
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...largest remaining cheetah population--about 3,000--inhabits the harshly beautiful savannah of Namibia in southwest Africa. That's where conservation biologist Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, hopes to ensure the great cat's survival. She sees it as a test case of whether human development and wildlife habitats can coexist. "If we can save the cheetah here," says Marker, "we are talking about saving an entire ecosystem. We can save the world...
...Marker, 45, first encountered cheetahs 25 years ago; they were in captivity at the Oregon wildlife park where she worked. Over the years she developed a successful cheetah breeding program. In the 1980s Marker made several trips to Namibia, where she began to use a cheetah she had raised in Oregon, named Khayam, to study the possibility of returning the cats to the wild. Although the animal hunted and killed by instinct, without the 18 to 22 months of training that a young cheetah gets from its mother, Khayam couldn't learn how to survive...
...Marker realized that if she was going to get serious about cheetah conservation, she'd have to move to Africa. In 1990 she negotiated the use of three farms near a national game reserve and set up the Cheetah Conservation Fund, transforming old farm buildings into an office and research center for scientists and students. More important, she opened a dialogue with local farmers. When she arrived, she recalls, "they were killing cheetahs right, left and center...
...could help the cat population as a whole--as long as the hunting is controlled. Farmers learned that if they allowed hunters on part of their land, they could make money from the occasional shooting of a cheetah, but made nothing if they kept killing the cats themselves. Meanwhile, Marker helped encourage the Namibia Professional Hunters' Association to enforce strict limits on the number of cheetahs shot. The logic was simple: shoot too many cheetahs now and there won't be any to shoot later...
Khayam died in 1986, but a new cat quickly took over her role. Orphaned as a cub and raised on the farm, the cheetah goes by the name of Chewbaaka, after the furry Star Wars character. That's an appropriate moniker for Marker's sidekick, since you could easily call Marker the Han Solo of the fight to protect cheetahs...