>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:04 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:14 >> With greetings, and good afternoon.  I am Laverne Page a librarian at the Library of Congress and I bid you welcome on behalf of two divisions: The African and Middle Eastern Division and the Science, Technology, and Business Division.  We have some good news and bad news.  Bad news first.  I regretfully inform you that Her Excellency Ambassador Cheetah of the genus Acinonyx Jubatus, Jubatus.  My Latin is so poor, I'm sorry.  Genus Acinonyx Jubatus, currently a resident of the vast state of Ohio in the US of A will not be with us today.  Within these hallowed halls with regret I tell you that.  Yet, our good news is that we do have her emissarium, her emissary, she who represents the Acinonyx Jubatus.  I keep mispronouncing that.  She's here with us today, Dr. Laurie Marker who has traveled from the Republic of Namibia in Southern Africa.  Cheetahs don't roar.  I'm told they bubble, chirp and purr.  And they would do that for Dr. Marker for the work that she's conducted on behalf of animal wildlife.  At the library I'm an area specialist in The African and Middle Eastern Division and I work with the Southern African countries and in that guise I made the acquaintance of Dr. Marker's work this past spring at the US Angola Chamber of Commerce.  An event here in Washington took place where she spoke about her work with cheetahs and also with energy resources in Angola.  At this time, I would like to introduce you to our acting chief of The African and Middle Eastern Division, Dr. Peggy Perlstein who will introduce our speaker.  Thank you. ^M00:02:46 [ Silence ] ^M00:02:52 >> Good afternoon everyone.  Dr. Laurie Marker is founder and executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund with its headquarters in Namibia, Africa.  Having worked with cheetahs since 1974, she set up the not for profit fund in 1990 and moved to Namibia to develop a permanent conservation research center for the wild cheetah.  In 1992 the Cheetah Conservation Fund became a registered Namibian trust.  It's groundbreaking activities are housed at their international research and education center in the main cheetah habitat of the country.  In July 2000, the fund opened a field research station to the public featuring a visitor's center as well as a cheetah museum and education center. Dr. Marker is a biologist and received her doctorate from Oxford University in England.  She has an extensive resume and has received a very impressive list of special awards.  Rather than reading this long list, it's probably best to refer to you, refer you to the website of the Cheetah Conservation Fund which you can see on the screen here.  And now, we're very pleased here at the Library of Congress to welcome Dr. Marker. ^M00:04:20 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:27 >> Thank you very welcome.  It's a great honor to be here and appreciate you all taking your lunch hour to learn about cheetahs which are the most wonderful and amazing animal there is in the world.  I hope that you'll all join me in appreciating that and glad to have a couple ambassadors here.  With his ear tag in maybe it could be launched into the wild here in Washington, D.C.  And I do have two of our Cheetah Conservation Fund staff, our research assistant director for research, Anne Schmidt-Kuntzel and a geneticist and veterinarian.  And Allison Rogers from our Cheetah Conservation Fund office here that we're based in the United States here in Alexandria.  But our field base is over in Namibia.  And I would like to share with you some of the work that we do.  And I am gonna talk about the race for its survival.  Being the fastest of all the land animals, it is in a race and I think that we are actually looking for this future.  But at this point in time, you know the cheetah's not gonna change its spots.  It is a, a sprinter, and it's not a marathoner.  And today I think we're in a marathon for species survival.  So I'm gonna talk with you a bit about the biology of the cheetah, some about the history of the cheetah, some of our global challenges that we're really faced with as well as that of some of our education and conservation programs, and then really what the future is gonna look like.  And I hope the future that all of you will help us to be a part of as well.  So, they are the fastest land animal.  If you can just imagine how the cheetah runs 70 miles an hour with one foot touching the ground.  In two points of the stride, no feet are touching the ground.  Every part of the cheetah's body is built for speed.  Small head, aerodynamic body, a tail that's like a rudder for balance so they don't roll over and spin out at 70 miles an hour.  In two points in their stride, they're flying through the air. When they're stretched out totally and doubled up and that's really what makes them just one of the most amazing species.  Today the problem facing the cheetah is people.  and although we can't run like the cheetah and steal its food quite like that, the problem facing the cheetah is that of loss of habitat and loss of prey, and all of these really revolve around human dominated issues.  Now, oh the cheetah's just amazing and few, few of us have ever really seen little tiny cubs and actually understand and live with them and know about them and study them is absolutely unbelievable.  But when a litter's born and not that many litters are born, in captivity, in the wild, but then what actually is their future going to be.  A female can have up to 6 cubs, 4 to 5 is average.  We know that there's about a 30% infant mortality under a month of age as the cubs start dispersing from their mom.  And we've looked at a lot of this and we'll talk a little bit more about them.  But, the female cheetah is the most amazing. She raises her cubs on her own and they stay with her until they're about 18 to 22 months of age.  Everything about the cheetah female revolves around raising her cubs and taking care of them.  They're not a big, powerful and aggressive animal and this is a problem for them in protected areas.  They lose about 95% of their cubs in protected areas because of the problems facing them with other large predators.  Lions and Hyenas will steal their food, kill their young, and although the cheetah's the fastest animal it can't protect its cubs.  So there's many problems facing them.  As cheetahs are on their own, the mother teaches the cubs how to hunt when they you know are growing up and it's all about following their body and learning how their body works and how to hunt and how to kill, but then on their own they leave mom at about 18 to 22 months and the brothers and sisters stick together.  Dominant, or males actually stay together their entire life.  That's formed a coalition, and brothers are very important in actually holding territories.  And then when the female cubs come into heat, dominant males chase them away, they can disperse a couple hundred kilometers away, and the females usually cubs stay within their mothers home ranges.  So that's a little bit about what their biology is like.  And one of the biggest things really affecting their survival is that the adult cheetahs are the ones that are oftentimes killed off in high numbers and the problems that they're facing today.  And that really is an interface with humans.  Human wildlife conflict as they're pushed out of these game reserves, they're in conflict with humans and as people see them they usually are seen, the adult animals at 4 to 5 years of age when dominant males are holding down territories and farmers catch and kill them, or females as they're going to marking areas to find males as they're reaching reproductive age at about 3 years of age.  So just the energy of getting into a breeding age is quite complex and hard for the cheetahs.  So as I've talked about the problems facing them is loss of habitat and the conflict with other large predators and then this conflict with humans and livestock which I'm gonna talk much more about. And then actually maintaining a viable population which is quite difficult in the human dominated landscape that Africa is looking at today.  But the cheetahs have a very long history on earth.  They're one of the oldest of all the cats.  Their closest relatives are that of the North American, well the Puma or Cougar and that of the Jacarandai.  But as you can see from our map, we have, actually the cheetah originated in North America, went over land bridges and populated you know all 4 of the continents of the world and then something happened and we believe it was about 10,000 years ago that the cheetah went through a bottleneck of some sort and with that genetic bottleneck, that was the same point in time when the cheetah was here in North America and we lost it, it went extinct, we also lost about 40 of the large mammals that also shared the United States, North America with us.  So we're not quite sure really what happened.  We have and can theorize many different things that did occur, but what it did is it left the cheetah genetically the same.  So it went through this big population and came out kind of all looking like the same species.  So the cheetah is genetically similar and this is some of the early research that we've done with the National Cancer Institute and Dr. Stephen O'Brien who is my mentor and many of the other geneticists' mentors in the world and cat specialist.  But one of the things that we also looked at is that cheetahs don't breed well in captivity.  My history with cheetahs goes back to '74.  I ran a wildlife park in Oregon and we were one of the few places in the world actually breeding a few cheetahs.  And I started working with Dr. O'Brien and friends at the Smithsonian, The National Zoo, David Wildt and Mitch Bush and we actually discovered this limited genetic variation and started looking at the reproductive problems.  But with that as you lose genetic diversity, it also causes a species to be much more vulnerable to the ecological changes and environmental changes that we're facing today.  And as you look at where cheetahs live throughout their range, they're all in arid environments.  And as you also think about global warming, we're quite concerned about the multitude of problems that can eventually continue to affect the cheetahs.  So their time is ticking away and I live down here in Namibia.  Namibia's a country that's about 2 1/2 times the size of California.  It's a very large country, a very arid country, about 2 million people.  The red area is where cheetahs are found today with only about 10,000 cheetah's left in the world.  Most of these populations up in here we don't know a lot about and probably 2/3 of those populations are so low in number there could only be perhaps 20 to 50 animals; less than 100.  The last of the Asian Cheetahs up here in Iran, where there's about 70 to 100 individuals.  We are working up there and throughout many of these Cheetah range countries.  But, 100 years ago the cheetahs were found in areas throughout all of this yellow and they, it is a recent extinction I would say.  In the 50's in India and 70's there in the middle east and the 80's into the northern areas of Russia.  So again this is what it looks like with a fragmented population of maybe 10 to 50 animals interspersed with huge human populations where this growth of the populations occurs and the cheetah get pushed out of game reserves.  They're then in constant interface with humans and their livestock, potentially in conflict in contact with domestic dogs and cats and different diseases.  And this is an area up in Kenya actually, this is the Nairobi National Park.  There's a cheetah in the park, and the cheetahs are no longer there in the Nairobi National Park just because of the continually growth of the populations.  And in working and living in Africa and working out of there for 35 years and living there for 20 years and traveling throughout Africa, everybody that I look at really looks like this, and as you look at them and you say cheetahs are beautiful, I mean they are, they're just wonderful.  But to most Africans really the value of wildlife is very limited.  They don't see the beauty that we see but, you know they're living with these animals and it's all about economics.  It's all about livelihoods.  So these are the questions on whether you're a cattle farmer or a sheep farmer or a camel farmer, throughout Africa there are conflicts with these predators.  The cheetah and all of our top predators do maintain the health of ecosystems and that's not something that you could talk to a subsistence farmer, it's not something that you could really talk about and explain to a rich farmer.  You can't really explain it to somebody in Europe or someone in America or in Africa, but our top predators maintain ecosystems.  Ecosystems maintain biodiversity.  Biodiversity maintains us.  It's very simple, but we don't seem to have the basis of ecology figured out, and we're losing ecosystems and we're losing top predators that help us.  But I'd like to bring you back into Namibia.  In Namibia, everyone is a rancher and a farmer.  I am too, and Cheetah Conservation Fund is.  We're model farmers and we put a lot of work into practice.  Cheetahs are found in this area here which is about the size of California, and it's right where our commercial livestock farming is.  Each one of these little black dots here is a commercial farm that's about 5,000, um 10,000 acres, 5,000 hectares.  The red are national parks, but there's less than 5% of our cheetah population living in national parks.  They're all right in the heart of the farming area.  But in Namibia, it's a very special country and its independent.  We got out independence about 20 years ago, the same time as I set up the Cheetah Conservation Fund, that although 95% of our cheetahs are living on the farmlands with the cattle, goats and sheep and farmers, we have also about 70% of our wildlife species outside of the protected areas, so it's an integrative system of livestock, wildlife, and predators.  Cheetahs have found a niche in there because a lot of the lions are gone because the lions and farmers don't seem to work well together and the cheetah populations have actually grown.  These are some of the favorite food of the cheetah, kudu, red hartebeest, the oryx, and the cheetahs not only will hunt the larger antelope but also the young of those antelope.  Conflict and predators are, go hand in hand and I always say is it a problem predator or is it problem people by us not quite understanding how things work.  But in my years of coming and going through Namibia, farmers had actually killed over 10,000 cheetahs in a 10 year period of time.  As I was back over here in the United States from my early studies in Namibia in the 70's learning what I had learned there and coming back here and traveling around the country and letting people know that the cheetah had a lot of challenges, and what could be done.  And I thought that there was a "they".  I call it the "they" factor.  That "they" will take care of things if people know about it.  And as the decade went on and nobody, none of the large organizations actually said that they would go do anything, I set up the Cheetah Conservation Fund and set up our base in Namibia at Independence to say that if this kind of a removal is going on, what's really happening.  Is it a perceived threat or is it an actual threat to the livestock?  So as I moved into Namibia, I went door to door and I talked to farmers and I found out a lot about them, about their systems, their family lives, their livestock, their wildlife, what they knew about predators, what they knew about cheetahs.  But it was all about the farming systems, and from that started asking them, that if they caught a cheetah instead of killing it could we come and start collecting biological samples, what could we actually do to work together and actually put out a book that's called Cheetah Survival on the Namibian Farmlands.  I don't think it's in the Library of Congress is it?  [laughing] I'll have to make sure we get one here.  But out of this, what I've found out is that improperly livestock, improperly managed livestock will become the prey of predators.  And what we don't want is we don't want predators eating prey, livestock.  And this is a worldwide phenomenon.  So the wolves in Montana and Wyoming are eating some livestock and a lot of it really revolves around our management.  And as we as humans put this kind of opportunity in front of predators, what we're doing is causing more problems for predators and people and it's a revolving problem.  But we've actually learned a lot about this and we've developed many tools.  And the tools are actually helping, I think not only save cheetahs but many other predators.  We were one of the first people to actually go outside of protected areas and talk to people about their issues with predators, and it's been a long-term study and very proud of the amount of people that we worked with.  I like people a lot and I like cheetahs a lot and I think that if we share what cheetahs are living and how they're living then cheetahs and people can live together.  Our founding president, His Excellency Dr. Sam Nujoma who is the founder of Namibia, the father of Namibia, actually is our international patriot and I met him here in Washington, D.C. right before moving over to Namibia.  And Namibia just developed its constitution.  It's the first constitution in the world that has sustainability of our systems and protection of our environment and I honored him and told him, did you know that cheetah, cheetahs, well Namibia is the cheetah capital of the world?  And he said well no, nobody had ever told me and I don't even know what a cheetah is.  So by becoming our patron he's become our dear friend as well.  We have short-term and long-term goals.  We do have a sanctuary now after 20 years of orphans coming in and out and we've got 57 orphans at our center right now, but our main goal is to try to put cheetahs back out into the wild.  Most of these animals are animals that farmers have caught that were perceived threats to livestock, are not catching livestock and the farmers allow us to put them back out into the wild. So we put over 6,000 animals back out into the wild.  Our research is as a leader in reproductive studies, genetic studies, reintroduction studies, ecology studies on how the cheetah lives.  And then looking at our education and trying to actually share the story of the cheetah with people worldwide and try to educate not only people and students and children, but young scientists, older scientists worldwide.  Politicians, so our, our message and education is deep, far, and wide.  And conservationists actually to develop programs that will ensure the survival of the cheetah in the world.  We have a wonderful research and education center that we did develop 10 years ago and I welcome everybody to come and visit us in Namibia, and it is a museum that is, it's an education museum and we get school children there, farmers, and people, and we're in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the bush, we get about 3,000 school children each year that come and visit us.  But from our center where we have a lot of land that we use for research, we breed livestock guarding dogs, and these dogs actually protect the livestock from predators.  And much of our research revolves around understanding how these dogs work.  We do a lot of work with school children as well.  And we work with a program that I think is really, really important.  It's called Future Farmers of Africa because Africans don't want to be subsistence farmers.  They want to be like we are.  They want to get to a level so that they're not worried about every single day and whether that goat has been, died from a disease or from a predator, and so often they don't even know what caused the problems.  And so much of it revolves around the lack of knowledge, not the lack of infor- the lack of information that they have. So Future Farmers of Africa I think is very important.  And then also working with other range countries, taking our model from what we've developed in Namibia and now training biologists throughout the cheetahs range countries and other predator friends.  This is a group of Iranians who we've worked with now for a 10 year period of time, and we've had many biologists come down and gone through our training in Namibia.  There's only 100 cheetahs left in Iran.  Well, maybe 10 years ago there were less than that, but today the cheetah has a face in Iran and we've been working with them on developing our next 10 year strategy to try to double that population in Iran well.  Now I was just in Angola and this is a short little video that is, this is where I live down at the Waterberg Plateau Park.  I went up to the Iona National Park where there had been a civil war for 35 years and we didn't know if there was any wildlife living.  It was a very about. . . big survey.  >> [Inaudible] it's either cheetah or leopard so we will take a sample and do some hair analysis and DNA to try to find out what it is.  It's quite exciting.  We're gonna look at some other trees [inaudible] too.  [Inaudible] a lot of sand.  No it smells like cheetah.  [laughing] >> This is a very candid video but I thought you'd enjoy it.  >> It just it's like a classic perfect cheetah play tree.  It's just amazing.  I think there's probably a lot down here.  I'm sure there's cheetahs out here and it'd be a great place to find out more.  Come on [inaudible].  All over there.  All over there, yeah.  Big food for cheetahs. There's a cheetah right there, can you even believe that?  Two cheetahs.  I don't even believe this. I don't even believe this. [laughing] >> I didn't.  >> This is the most exciting thing, I can't even believe it. [laughing] >> So I didn't believe it but, I've gone into a few different areas and looking at surveys trying to find out where cheetahs may be.  We thought that they were extinct in Angola and are now know that they are there or have somehow made it through the war for a long time.  The game numbers are coming back and we're trying to work closely with the government to look at a potential growth of this Iona National Park, so it is quite exciting.  And then the scat all comes back to my colleague Anne and we can then look at the, you know the make of the population.  We're trying to actually look at cheetahs throughout their range and so anyone who knows anyone anywhere who might find scat, please we're collecting scat.  As a biologist, we spend a lot of our time looking at that but we do a lot of other sample collection as well.  This is the area that we, our direct research area which is about 15,000 square kilometers.  Our center is right here at the base of the Waterberg National Park and all of these red dots are where we have gone to farmers and picked cheetahs up that the farmers had trapped and wanted to kill and asked for our help.  All the black dots is where we've gone door to door and talked to farmers about their issues.  And so I have a lot of background history on all of this whole system.  And then here in this area, our direct research area, is where we've done a lot of our radio telemetry.  So all of these are points that we've then gone and done a lot of ground truthing.  So we know a lot about the habitat of how cheetahs live and how they do live.  So we work in taking blood samples, fecal samples, we do necropsies.  And our biology program is very, very extensive.  This is Dr.  Stephen O'Brien who is the renowned geneticist from the National Cancer Institute we, who is, who I worked with in the early 80's when we first discovered the lack of genetic variation with the cheetahs.  We have developed some wonderful labs in the middle of nowhere where we have reproductive physiology labs.  We collect their blood.  We've got one of the largest databases on over 900 cheetahs, which is amazing. Some of the studies that we also look at since we have these orphan cheetahs that live in our sanctuary, that we've looked at gastritis.  And cheetahs that live in captivity around the world, and there are about 1,000 of them, we know that about 99% of them have very big problems with gastritis which is a helicobacter which is the same kind of problem that causes us as humans to get gastritis or ulcers.  And so we study that.  Again we use scat, but we also do a lot of work with endoscopies and we're trying to link it together with some of the problems that face cheetahs in captivity, some of the rare diseases that we've worked on and studied for about 25 years.  And we do a lot of our collaboration with The Smithsonian and the National Zoo.  This is just what the cortisol levels look like for a wild cheetah, that of captive cheetahs, and so the diseases are quite problematic in captivity and we make recommendations using our data then to try to allow cheetahs to try to live more healthy in our captive environments.  Some of our reproductive physiology research is been with, again, our Smithsonian partners.  And after 25 years of studying, we've learned a lot about banking sperm, and from our banked sperm cheetahs do have about 70% abnormal sperm.  This is one of the poster child's of abnormal sperm, 4 heads, 2 tails, but we do and have developed field practices that we can bank down sperm at best practice and in the last few years we've been working to gather the basic biology of the female  to try to understand a lot more about the female aspect of reproduction.  And we were able to actually bank the first blastocyst stage embryo, and that's also banked at our field station in Namibia.  Here's some of our orphans and I just, we've got, we, each one of them have a story and you can learn more about them.  We just got the Okakara clan in about a month ago.  We released 4 cheetahs back in the wild and the same day we got 4 cheetahs in.  Okakara is a community near us.  The stars are two years old.  They came in as 2 day old cubs and Allison and Anne and myself helped raise them from that period of time.  Raising little cubs up like this is not very easy.  This is the age of our 57 cheetahs.  They're all now getting older and some of these older ones are gonna give us more health issues but study, use them to learn much more, and then when they've come in they all come in in the blue age as very tiny babies under usually 2 months.  So when they come in at that age, and that age, they don't think that they're cheetahs and they really can't go back into the wild.  But we've looked at trying to find the kinds of personalities and behavior of certain cheetahs that might be able to go back out in the wild.  But that is a separate thing because that's a program that we call re-wilding with some of our habituated cheetahs.  As I said most of the animals that we now handle are animals, if they're adults and they're caught in cages and the they were caught because they were you know they were there on the land, a perceived threat to livestock.  So what we do is we work with the farmers to put them back in the wild.  And today, fortunately, most of the farmers are learning about this and they've learned that they don't have to catch and kill cheetahs.  But what we've learned over the years with our radio telemetry study is how they live.  And how we know a lot about the movement patterns.  And so with collars, vhf collars, we use satellite collars now which are wonderful, we know that a  home range is about 1600 square kilometers.  It's one of the largest home ranges of any, anything on earth actually.  And then you start looking at how you manage populations like this.  What does that mean that they're covering for a cheetah an average range is 20 farms, which each of those is about 10,000 acres each.  And you just don't go buy everything up, you have to work with people.  And this has allowed us by showing these kinds of movement patterns over different farmlands, the farmers have learned a lot about how the cheetahs live on their lands. We do other censusing techniques as well working together with Fabiano who's one of our PhD students, and Matti Nghikembua who is our chief ecologist, and we've developed a lot of work around sport tracking and that of camera trapping which now taking a lot of the work that we've done with our radio telemetry, overlapping it with the camera trapping we've learned much more about the densities of these cats, and we do work very closely with many different partners but Earthwatch has been one of our very, very important partners in much of the work that we've done and we've had a 16 year partnership with Earthwatch.  So if anyone wants to volunteer, please come and we put you to work and Earthwatch is great to work with.  So this is what some of our camera trapping looks like.  You already saw in the one video that cheetahs go to play trees.  They go there, they mark their territory with scat which makes it very easy for us to find.  The cameras are set up so that the cheetahs take their own pictures, and by learning what how the cheetahs live in much of our radio telemetry it shows us where we can actually put cameras.  Cheetahs do have a, all individual spotting pattern so you can tell them all differently by the, how they look.  And you start looking at these cats and the spots come out at you and you can tell all the cheetahs differently.  And then our intense research area's about 600 square kilometers and this is sort of how we would set up our camera traps and some of the pictures that we get.  But even over this huge are of 600 square kilometers, I think that's 300 square miles for you to kind of put your head around, we only would find and we've this is our 5th year, about 10 to 12 cheetahs.  And out of that it comes to a density, a very low density of about 4 cheetahs per thousand kilometers square.  So that's, or 4 cheetahs per 500 square miles.  I think I might, my math is correct there.  So it gives you an idea of the amount of low-density and how you actually find these animals.  So the camera traps are great, the radio telemetry is great, but we're doing several other things.  Now this is just recently we were able to set up a genetics lab, and with the applied bio-systems, and this is Anne and this is her lab and her gene sequencer which is probably the most important piece of equipment for a geneticist that this was donated to us down in the middle of Namibia to find out if we could actually use it for our genetics work.  This is Dr. Bruce Brewer and he's our general manager.  Fabiano is our PhD student who's actually spent time both here, you met him at the Angola meeting.  But from that, there's a couple things while we're looking at kind of the, how cheetahs are, how does the population structure look like and so for my PhD, I was able to actually identify cheetahs you know throughout Namibia and this is the whole area that I got samples in and could find out that there's a structure to it but we found outliers in different areas of the country where you'd end up with smaller number of alleles.  And these are things that we're trying to look a little bit more at to find out how the population is gonna flow, through not only Namibia, as we continue to fragment even Namibia, but into other populations of Botswana and out into Zimbabwe and where, that's where our studies are going forward.  But I forgot to introduce Chewbacca who was sitting there in the genetics lab as well.  Now Chewbacca is an Ambassador who I've raised since well, since he was about 10 days old.  He is 15 years of age and this is him anesthetized just a couple weeks ago with Dr. O'Brien there and Dr. Schmidt-Kuntzel and what we're doing is taking a biopsy of him, and he is going to be sequenced.  He's going to be the cheetah that is sequenced for eternity to kind of pay back him for being the great Ambassador and for us to learn much more about.  So it's an honor for Chewbacca and he's gonna be part of what's called the Genome 10K Project.  But, we want to know more about population monitoring and understanding how these are, and we, I'm pretty good at finding play trees.  Monte is really good too, we can find the scat.  But, there's more scat out there and dogs are wonderful.  So this is Finn and Finn is an employee, an oncologist at CCF.  He was born and educated in Philadelphia and went to Scat Detection Dog Training in Seattle and then was donated to us a year and a half ago.  And so he's now, along with one of our other dogs, and we're getting more scat detection dogs in, are going to be helping us with our work throughout all of the different areas of not only Namibia but these other range countries that we're starting to work in. So as you saw early on with the video that habitat and prey are very, very important and we do study this, it's very, very important.  But one of the things that as we've been in Namibia for years studying it we've realized early on that we were losing half of the cheetahs habitat in one of the most important countries and it's not a Namibian phenomenon at all, it's a phenomenon around places that are over-grazed in an arid environment.  It's called bush encroachment.  Bush encroachment is a form of desertification, and you end up, this is what Namibia looked like, it was a grassland savannah, and from over-grazing in an arid environment, thickened thorn bushes have taken over.  And if  any of you have been over to Africa, you know what those thorn bushes feel like.  Well they've now taken over about 1/3 of the country and this green area is area that is very, very thick in thorn, so thick that you can hardly, you can't penetrate it.  So that means that you, farmers have doubled the size of their farmland to have the same amount of cattle, they can't kill the bush and so they're killing more cheetahs and we got involved in this because we found cheetahs with blinded eyes that were becoming livestock catching animals, and the blinded eye was being caused by them scratching their eyes in this thick bush.  So we actually started studying this and that's where the map earlier was.  We've got about 26 million hectares of thickened thorn bush.  It's reduced the farming productivity.  It's affected our economy by over a million US dollars per year, and it's changed the biodiversity.  And this is what some of the eyes early on that we were actually seeing.  And so we got involved in this thinking, you know there's got to be a solution to this thick bush instead of just killing cheetahs and everybody being angry.  And so we started a habitat restoration project and wondered whether we could actually maybe put people to work by chipping bush, and if so what would that look like and how would you do it?  And we'd have to do a lot of biodiversity studies and continue to do this to find out if your harvest is appropriate or not.  So we put a whole bunch of people to work and so that's then the sort of like the social side of things is communities benefitting from having a predator on the land.  And then we ended up coming up with an interesting project which is called a, a fuel log or an eco-log, kind of like your duraflame logs but our logs are, don't have any additives and they're heavier and we are Forest Stewardship Council certified, and I'm a big proponent of certification.  Everybody should buy certified products because that means that it is done in a way that is appropriate for biodiversity and ecology in the future.  So we harvest about 2,000 tons a year which is not very much, and we have put a lot of people to work.  And this is what our little plant looks like.  That's what the logs look like.  This is called an extruder, and I've learned a lot about bush.  We like women to work with us as well.  And our bush logs have become quite famous in small areas, but one of them was that we did win the Intel Environmental Award a couple years ago through the Tech Awards and it's gotten quite a bit of other attention as well.  But now we're looking at understanding the harvest rates and the biodiversity and we're using cheetah ranges to understand how, what ranges of cheetahs and prey and what the habitat looks like and what we're modeling for.  And we're thinking that we could actually have so much bush that we could go into biomass generation, and this is the area that we're looking at right now because our little fuel logs are just too little and they're not gonna really take the habitat to the degree that we need. And so we're now looking at the appropriate technique and the, that and I think Europe by 2020 is supposed to have 20 or 30% biomass used in its fuel for power.  So we very well may be powering Europe, and I do call that cheetah power. [laughing] Back to kind of the groundwork because a lot of these things, you need people and people need to understand things and this is again where we spend a lot of our time with our Future Farmers of Africa program.  We teach and train farmers how to give vaccinations, how to properly have livestock integrated with wildlife.  So there's a lot that can be done.  These are our livestock guarding dogs.  This is Ushi and Tai Lee.  And they grow up and actually live with the flock.  So they think that they are the smart goat.  They look a lot like them.  They come from Turkey and we have used the Kangal and the Anatolian Shepherd because they have short hair.  They're independent thinkers and they really don't need us at all, but they are very, very smart and they've been doing this to protect livestock for over 6,000 years.  So we have bred over 350 puppies and donated them to farmers.  It's a rare breed with a very reduced gene pool as well and so we actually are trying to get new bloodline in. This year we just had the first puppies born through artificial insemination.  And for here in the United States probably dog breeders do that, but over in Africa it was sort of a rarity and getting the sperm in was the first sperm in the, to Namibia.  So that, those are our 3 AI puppies and they'll all be kinda the future breeders with that gene pool.  We've had another 20 puppies born already this year as well and we put farmers through training courses.  We donate the puppies when they're about 8 weeks of age.  They go out to the farming communities.  We then work with the farmers, we follow-up, make sure that they're all doing well on a constant long-term basis.  And I put this picture up here because oftentimes we think that children are in schools which is where they should be.  Out in Africa, throughout most of Africa, kids are really lucky if they get to go to school at all.  Most often the kids are out taking care of their family's herds, their goats, their sheep.  And, what would you do if your kids, or what would you do, what would I do if I was out there in the bush at that age, even at my age now, and I ran into a cheetah or a leopard or a poisonous snake or a lion?  Man I would run away; hence, more livestock loss.  But the kids should be in school and so the dogs actually play a key role.  They can protect livestock.  Kids can go to the school.  Farmers don't love livestock. They can live with predators so it's a happy, happy, happy story.  We like happy stories. So with our international training we are now bringing people from throughout Africa down into our training programs, and over the last few years we've put over 400 international biologists through conservation science programs.  The last couple years we've been focusing just on cheetah range country biologists.  These are professionals; we give them the best training.  And much of our work has been supported by the Howard Buffett Foundation.  And we've, also do a lot of training with Namibians and we put over 65 Namibians through our training programs that are 6 month programs and many of them are now running the environmental programs, and the ministry of environment and education and agriculture.  Back to some of the economics.  So we've been able to find out that you can live with predators.  We know that our beef's some of the best in the world because it's also predator friendly in most cases.  Certification again is a very important thing that I've already talked with  you about.  In doing one of a economic studies, this is also a part of my PhD, realized that people will pay more money and a price premium if you have good food.  Organic is good.  It doesn't mean the predators aren't being killed, but what we looked at was working with our Meatco and our farmers that were doing good work in conservancies and we developed a label that we're trying to market which is called Cheetah Country Beef whereby being certified as a good farmer who's not killing cheetahs and is doing really good with his integrated system of livestock protection and wildlife management, that Cheetah Country Beef can actually bring a price premium back to farmers and they can be not making this money, they can be making that money and it would actually take over a lot of Africa.  And cheetahs and other predators could actually survive for the future.  So what we need are more models and conservancies are important and Namibia is a model for conservation.  So these large scapes really interface with people, livestock, wildlife and this is the model that we're looking at from throughout Africa.  Namibia has over 40% of the country in conservation.  The brown areas are communal conservancies.  The green areas in here are commercial conservancies.  This is national park.  In 20 years we've gone from a core of about 20, or 2,000 cheetahs in this whole area to now the big cores are in these pink areas to probably close to 4,000 cheetahs.  So cheetahs, we've doubled the range.  We've doubled the number, and we've gotten people who have learned to live with cheetahs.  Now we're looking at a whole 'nother area in our next-door neighbor.  We are right over here.  This is the Waterberg Plateau Park.  This is a communal conservancy by the Herero speaking people or the Okakara clan, and it's an area where cheetahs, wild dogs, and rhinos are all living.  And we're now looking at an area that is about 20 million acres and is the Greater Waterberg Complex and we believe that this is gonna be one of the largest areas where cheetahs and their friends can live in harmony with people.  So although we acknowledge that there are places where there is still conflict and not all predators can live, we have solutions, we've got models and we're gonna grow this throughout the cheetah's range.  We've done reintroductions, and this is quite exciting taking some of our habituated cheetahs.  These are two cats that we forecast that were released a month ago.  In a couple week period of time they've been hunting regularly.  They're doing very, very well.  With this re-wilding, these are habituated cats that came in as orphans at CCF.  We've re-established the southern part of Namibia.  With the work that we've done for the last several years, we're looking at actually with this, going and trying to re-establish populations in Zambia as well as in potentially northern [inaudible] and Russia.  And just last year I think we were part of, well this is what we've learned, we were a part of working together with people in India to potentially re-wild a population of cheetahs back into India as well. So we've learned a lot about what needs to be done.  We need habitat.  We need prey.  We need animals that we can learn about which we've done, and we need people who are willing to want to live with cheetahs again.  Cheetahs were extinct in India for the last 50 years, and they might come back again. They've been revered for kings and, kings, emperors and princes for over 5,000 years. They've been loved to near-extinction and today's the time that we may have an opportunity of trying to bring them back.  So we've made a difference, we've looked at the ecology side of things, we've looked at the social side, and we've looked at  the economy.  And out of all of this, we think that if we can get it right, that we can actually save the cheetah for the future. So we believe that we have to be creative in conservation for the future.  Of course that also stands for CCF which is Cheetah Conservation Fund.  Thank you very much and we hope that we will continue to work with the people and our visions are big, our challenges are even bigger, and I'm just hoping that the cheetah will keep us going forward fast and we need lots of people to help us.  Spread the word, tell lots of people that you can get involved, help us.  Help us in many ways, and a lot of it does revolve around economics because the work that happens is not government funded.  We are a small non-profit organization, and everything that we do is done because people care and care about the cheetah, the ecosystem and other people.  So, come and visit us. I've told everybody you're always welcome.  Cheetahs, Namibia's probably the safest country there is in the entire world.  It is a great place.  It is democratic.  It's a great place to invest as well.  So, think about Namibia, learn about Namibia, and from Namibia we are going to be changing the world.  Thank you. ^M00:48:52 [ Applause ] ^M00:49:00 >> We do have about 5 minutes if anybody would like a question.  Yes?  >> I have 2 quick ones.  First I'm, first congratulations on this.  This is magnificent.  I'm wondering, the ability to introduce 600 animals back into the wild over total population of 10,000; that's incredible. I'm wondering. . .  >> These were already animals that were living in the wild. We just got to let the farmers let them out. >> Oh. >> Instead of taking them back.  Okay.  >> I'm wondering when, do you do any re-introduction with domesticated or animals who have been kept in captivity?  >> Well those are our re-wilding programs. >> Exactly.  >> And that's where we've re-established the southern part of Namibia and we're now looking at re-wilding some of these other countries.  >> Do their, you did nice [inaudible] on how stressed out the captive ones were in terms of disease and cortisol [inaudible], do they change once they're released in the wild?  That's question one. >> We're trying to find that out.  >> Okay. >> But our cats that live in our Namibian, I should've said that, are baseline because we're in such a large area.  So our cats in our studies over a 10 year period have been the baseline for studying why all the other cats living in captivity in zoos around the world are stressed and so that gives you, yeah go ahead.  >> The second thing is, the biggest, the biggest threat is people?  >> Yes.  >> I'm wondering if you've had any success getting African conservation groups to jump into this, and I'm asking from the perspective of someone who's worked with [inaudible] conservation initiative in central Congo.  We've had huge success by basically getting local people to jump on board for two different sets of reasons.  One economic, we help provide health clinics, schools that type of thing in exchange for protection.  But the other is more [inaudible] anywhere in the southern African sphere where you're introducing, in introducing these programs, people have an indigenous respect for cheetahs.  Now, you know [inaudible] we found a group that had proscriptions against hunting and killing, and they protect the wild.  They don't need outside [inaudible], it's their tradition.  >> The answer is no.  >> Nothing like that?  >> No.  This is all about human wildlife conflict and their predators so.  >> So you. . . >> Bonobos are lovely,  you're lucky.  But with it, we work, my hat is as a Namibian and Namibia, Cheetah Conservation Fund is a Namibia Foundation, so we're actually, we are Namibian even though I have an American accent, you get me to help tell the story.  I'm an American as well, so, not many, you know I'm a tough cookie there I guess.  But we do work, I mean that's what we're doing with our training programs are trying to develop programs, we're working with all the different governments of cheetah range countries so that they can be, they can all have a Cheetah Conservation Fund program in their countries that is as successful as ours.  So it's the model.  I hope I've been able to help share that a little bit.  >> I also have two questions.  One is, are cheetahs still threatened by poaching for the fur trading?  >> It's a small amount, and not the biggest threat to them. Their prey base that is poached is more. The young cubs being caught and sold as cubs is the biggest threat to them, and may of these cats are now going into, into the middle east.  But usually they are caught as cubs and they die so it's, it's not that good.  >> The second question is, a lot of people like to keep exotic animals.  How much of a problem is it for people to get a hold of like baby cheetahs and then try to sell them into like the pet?  >> Well that's, there is some illegal trade as I just mentioned, going into mostly places like the Middle East.  What we were able to do and I've actually run the international stud book and developed it about 25 years ago, but there were so few cheetahs living in captivity we were able to work together with the International Professional Zoological Organizations, actually group around it and there is no movement in sales of cheetahs into private parties, so to speak. Europe has a little bit but, the cheetah in that respect has been quite well protected except now some of the illegal trade that's going on because they've been used for hunting. You know kings, emperors and princes used them for coursing, like falconry, and if you got enough money you can pay somebody, and I know that, I think the man next to you is from Somalia and we've actually had some things going on there where there's been a lot of capture down in the Ethiopia area, and then they've gone into like Djibouti and into the middle east.  And we've been involved in some of that work quite a bit. >> I just wanted to say something very sad which is I recently, I lived in Uganda as a child and used to go to Murchison Falls [inaudible] Park where there used to be cheetahs. . . >> Yes.  >> There aren't any now.  Are there any attempts to put cheetahs back into the places where cheetahs had been? >> Well that's why we're working in Zambia at this point in time, and Uganda.  We've had students from there coming down or professionals from their wildlife department.  So Uganda is on our list, but the governments have to come to us and want to have the populations back and we can then help.  But our re-wilding program where we've been able to show some success, places like Zambia have, they were only down to like 50 animals, they want cheetahs, they've trained their biologists, Zambia's an up and coming, wonderful country.  So these kinds of things if we have habitat and prey and can actually deal with the human wildlife conflict interface which revolves around education and economics, then we could potentially look at putting animals back into different areas.  But you have to get all those things right and we have to do it rapidly.  And I just, the sense of speed in which we have to do this is faster than I can even explain to you, and I hope that all of you do know that and, from here I think Washington, D.C. is such a important hub to spread the word about our environment, our wildlife issues, and the ways that all of us can work together.  And so every, every place that I go I try to go into the hub and try to deal with the politicians as well because it all does revolve around economics, and policies and security, and education, so.  >> [Inaudible] of the high mortality in captivity and I don't, I'm having a hard time understanding how one can compensate for such a huge area that's normally covered by a cheetah and the ability to run.  I mean I just think just even taking that away would stress an animal.  I mean are there certain things that you've already pinpointed that can help?  >> Sure.  Running, and so we use mechanical lures and we suggest that every zoo runs their cheetahs regularly so they can actually get that, that speed out.  And so that's a very important part.  The National Zoo has a lure system.  The National Zoo has also just set up a great breeding facility at the, their conservation research center.  So we've looked at, you know, at asking facilities to have larger areas and actually running their animals.  That, that definitely helps.  Reducing vision of lions and tigers, letting them have a place where they can just, you know, sleep if they want which isn't really the best exhibit, but those are all things that we make recommendations on.  The cheetah's an animal that really doesn't want to live in captivity.  It wants to lead us as humans into a place where they can survive which, in my opinion, is going to allow all of us to survive because these systems will be intact.  So it's, it's a messenger, and the message is we better really get it, and work fast. Thank you very much [applause] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc.gov. ^M00:57:42 [ Silence ]