Meeting a Cheetah and His Dog at a Studio City Home

Laurie Marker will be making house calls over the next few weeks in the San Fernando Valley, Westside and other parts of Los Angeles.

She is trying to let people know about the plight of cheetahs, and she introduced some locals to the grand cats recently in Studio City at the home of Allan and Diane (and wonder dog – Heidi). 

Look for her and her work in local press over the next few weeks.

Laurie says:

"Since getting back in Namibia, I have been as busy as ever! We placed two more litters of livestock guarding puppies with Namibian ranchers (and now have another pregnant Anatolian). Additionally, we’ve had three groups of Namibian farmers come to stay at CCF for livestock management training programs. A couple weeks ago was our annual gala in Windhoek. The President of Namibia sent the Minister of Lands and Resettlement to represent him at the gala. The Minister gave a wonderful speech. Also attending were our speaker Valli Moosa, a former director of IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) who is currently the Chair of the World Wildlife Fund South African. We are hosting our second group of high school students from National Geographic Student Expeditions who come to spend a few days at CCF, as well as a university group from Texas A & M.  They all learned about all aspects of CCF including our model farm, our livestock guarding dogs and cheetahs and human wildlife conflict solutions. In addition,  they all toured the vet clinic and genetic lab to learn how to identify both cheetahs and other Namibian animals from their scat and tracks. As you can see, it’s been a wild time here at CCF!"

She adds, "I would love to have you get involved with the Cheetah Conservation Fund, and hope you have seen our Chewbaaka Memorial Challenge communications.  This is such an important fundraising effort for us and I hope that you can help support us."

 Learn more here:

www.cheetah.org

Help the Cheetah Conservation Fund keep the cheetah where it belongs--in the wild.   Donate. Volunteer.Visit!  Follow us:    

To learn more about CCF go to the Smithsonian Magazine article at  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-breed.html and watch this 3 minute video to get a visual overview of our work to save the cheetah and help people in cheetah-range countries  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwnLdBbjWDg.

And thank you Donovan Sylla for the photos and the video.