Progress in Race to Save Cheetahs

From the creator

From http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish Cheetahs are beautiful and speedy. They can run as fast as 110 kilometers an hour. There once were more than 100,000 cheetahs living in Africa and Asia. Today only about 10,000 of the animals remain. Most are in 24 African countries. Laurie Marker is working to keep cheetahs from disappearing. LAURIE MARKER: "I started working with cheetahs when I lived in Oregon -- and I ran a wildlife park there; this was back in the early '70s, and nobody knew anything about cheetahs and I was fascinated about them, and the more people I asked they said 'when you find out something about cheetahs let us know; they don't do well in captivity, they have a very short life span, and we're losing them throughout the ranges in the world.' So that just made me fascinated and I wanted to know everything there was about them." Dr. Marker traveled to Namibia to learn more about cheetahs. The country has the world's largest wild cheetah population. LAURIE MARKER: "Understanding about how the cheetah lives is really important. So understanding its biology and its behavior, understanding the ecology of it, which really revolves around where it's living and, and how it's living, and that interfaces with humans." In 1990, Dr. Marker created the Cheetah Conservation Fund, a nonprofit group based in Namibia. Farmers often kill cheetahs because they can attack cattle and other farm animals. So Dr. Marker started working with f

Published 2012-07-03 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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