Gabi Fleury
PhD Student
Biography
I have been fascinated by African carnivores as long as I can remember. My favorite animals when I was little were African wild dogs and cheetahs, for the simple reason that, for a kid with bone cancer, they could do what I couldn’t: run fast. I spent my childhood awed by glimpses of these creatures through nature documentaries, books, and a Make-A-Wish trip to Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It was not until I became older that I realized that, for all their beauty, grace, and power, these animals were locked in an ongoing race against extinction that even they might not be able to outrun. At least, not without help.
At James Madison University, I connected with the thriving Maasai community that existed, in all places, Harrisonburg Virginia. Through long talks over cups of Kenyan chai, human-wildlife conflict, which I had understood in an academic sense as one of the most pressing problems impacting carnivores, became real, as did the people who were also suffering the impacts of these carnivores on their livelihoods. During my work on my undergraduate thesis about lion-livestock conflict in the Amboseli Region of Kenya, I began to see the other side of the story. I began to understand for the first time the frustration, fear, and uncertainty that these farmers felt when livestock killed by hungry carnivores represented an entire community’s lost status and opportunity.
For my Master’s degree under a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, I chose to attend the University of Cape Town for full immersion into African conservation issues and began to practice Afrikaans both in the classroom and in the field. In the hot expanse of South Africa’s Northern Cape, my research revealed that a change in herding practices, driven by youth leaving farming, had impacted grazing patterns. This further affected the carrying capacity of livestock on the land. During my research near the Namibian border, strung-up jackal pelts at the cattle posts and the body of a calf with a leopard’s fang marks in its throat, illustrated the essential problem that had persisted – the ancient conflict between livestock producers and the carnivores that shared the landscape.
Dr. Laurie Marker, who I had admired since childhood, engaged me in my first full- time job after my Master’s degree as Human-Wildlife Conflict Research Manager at Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. Although most of my responsibilities were to test deterrents to mitigate livestock losses, I was part of the team that rescued nine orphaned African wild dog puppies after all the adults in their pack were shot in a retaliatory act by a farmer. At the 2018 International Pathways Conference in Namibia for human-wildlife coexistence, I was impressed by Cheetah Conservation Botswana (CCB) and Botswana Predator Conservation’s (BPC) work to mitigate conflict with carnivores in Botswana. Although they were working on similar carnivore issues, they approach them from two different directions, the former more field-based with farmers, and the latter more academic, pioneering work with scent boundaries in African wild dogs.
Building off the project conceptualized in my awarded 2020/2021 Fulbright Grant to Botswana, as a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I will be carrying out a holistic study of audio, visual, and scent-based nonlethal carnivore deterrents in the commercial farmlands of the Ghanzi District with my local collaborators.
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Curriculum Vitae