Laurie Marker is an American zoologist, researcher, author, educator, and one of the world's foremost cheetah experts, who founded the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) in 1990. As executive director of CCF, among many endeavors, Marker helps rehabilitate cheetahs and reintroduce them to the wild, performs research into conservation, biology and ecology, educates groups around the world, and works toward a holistic approach to saving the cheetah and its ecosystems in the wild. Before her work with CCF, Marker's career started to take off at the Wildlife Safari in the U.S., where her interest with captive cheetahs began.
Early life Laurie Marker (née Laura Lee Bushey) was born in Detroit, Michigan and lived in Birmingham, a suburb of Detroit. Her father, Ralph, came from a farming family and was an agricultural economist and accountant. Her mother, Marline, was an elementary and high school teacher and kept the family active in the community with nonprofit work. Marker's family moved to Southern California when she was four years-old. She spent her childhood surrounded by animals, learning how to care for horses, dogs, cats, rabbits, donkeys and goats. Marker's family resettled in Palos Verdes, and later in San Jose, both in Northern California (USA), in time for her to finish high school at age 16. There she solidified her love for animals, starting with her dogs, and her horse on which she competed locally. She started college early at San Francisco State University, intending to become a veterinarian, but the emerging wine industry in the Napa Valley caught her eye. She enrolled in the agriculture, enology and viticulture programs at Napa Valley College. While there she re-opened the Pope Valley Winery, in Angwin, which had been closed since prohibition. She also began operating a dairy goat farm.
Career beginnings Marker soon moved her wine and goat operations to Oregon, where she founded Jonicole Vineyards. In 1974, to make ends meet, she began working at the newly opened local exotic animal park, Wildlife Safari, in Winston Oregon, where her tenure spanned 16 years. She was fascinated by the cheetahs she met there, and was struck by how little was collectively known about them in the scientific community. Marker decided to extensively study the ten cheetahs at Wildlife Safari and began developing what eventually became the most successful captive breeding program in the country. She had inadvertently become one of the world's foremost experts on cheetahs, and began teaching zoo keepers and other captive breeders her techniques, and slowly expanded her research. In 1977, Marker took a trip to South West Africa (now Namibia), which contained the largest living population of wild cheetahs. She brought with her a captive-born cheetah named Khayam, in order to test her theory that captive-raised cheetahs could be taught to hunt in a wild setting, and could potentially survive if released. While there, she learned that cheetahs were being killed by farmers at an unsustainable rate of around 900 per year, mostly due to the cats being misunderstood and wrongly accused of killing their livestock.
When Marker returned with Khayam to the U.S. several months later following their successful research project, they traveled regionally and nationally making public appearances to generate awareness for the cheetah's plight. Khayam served as the first ambassador animal for her species. International Cheetah Day is now celebrated every year on December 4, Khayam's birthday, in her honor. For the next ten years, Marker continued traveling to Africa to learn more about the wild cheetah's problems and what could be done to assist endangered populations. From 1988 to 1991, Marker served as executive director at the Smithsonian Institution's Center for New Opportunities in Animal Health Sciences (NOAHS), in Washington DC.
Cheetah conservation work In 1990, Marker founded the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), which began as a research outpost in a small farmhouse on some land in Otjiwarongo, Namibia. She got the funding to purchase and start the initial facility by selling all of her possessions. Marker saw the problem of saving cheetahs as a holistic issue, in which local communities, farmers and governments needed to participate together for mutual goals. She created programs to aid farmers by providing free training in predator identification and livestock husbandry techniques to increase understanding and decrease losses. CCF has since bloomed into a world-renowned ecotourism venue, and a conservation, research and education facility which reaches thousands of farmers, tens of thousands of students, and hundreds of thousands of online supporters worldwide.
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