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CAT Woman
Kristin Nowell's nonprofit organization raises funds to preserve endangered species of wild cats around the world
By Sandy Sims
In 1988, after they'd both graduated from Stanford and married, Tom Preisser took his wife, Kristin Nowell, to Taiwan, where he'd taken a job in a packaging company. Little did he realize this was actually the beginning of an amazing journey his wife would take him on.
The journey would include meeting headhunters in Taiwan, going undercover in China to learn about the illegal animal trade, following cheetahs in Namibia for four years, and traveling to Cambodia and Mongolia, all because of wild cats.
The results of these 11 years are astounding. Nowell is directly responsible for setting up conservation programs in Taiwan, Namibia, Cambodia and Mongolia, and for implementing U.S. policy that imposes sanctions on countries that ignore their own policies prohibiting the use of endangered species in traditional medicines.
She even talked Exxon into setting up its own tiger conservation program, to which they have donated $6 million. "That was a natural," Nowell explains, laughing. "I told them they couldn't have an extinct logo." Nowell and Preisser were invited to Las Vegas when Exxon announced it was becoming partners in tiger conservation with tiger trainers Seigfried and Roy.
Nowell's work also includes co-authoring, with well-known conservationist Peter Jackson, the definitive book on wild cats, Wild Cats, status, survey and conservation action plan--some even call it the cat bible. Articles about her work have appeared in Time magazine and The London Times.
And Nowell is only 33 years old.
"She's the boss," Preisser says.
"He is a tremendous support," she says.
Photograph by George Sakkestad
Xams, a 5-year-old "African Yorkshire terrier," is enjoying a soft life stateside.
Nowell will be featured on CNN in mid-July for the project her organization Cat Action Treasury (CAT) coordinated on the rare Andean mountain cat.
CAT is a nonprofit agency Nowell and Preisser set up as a vehicle to match funding with wild cat projects all over the world.
Although CAT is an international organization, it has ties to three local communities. "We had to have our address in Los Gatos [Spanish for 'The Cats']," Nowell explains. So they got a Los Gatos post office box.
They bank at the Saratoga National Bank because they were able to make a special arrangement with the bank to waive wire-transfer fees. Nowell wires funding to places like Pakistan, Cambodia and Bolivia, and the fees can become expensive.
Nowell and Preisser live modestly in a tiny house in Campbell. Their office is a six-by-six-foot floor space in the living room marked off by a low table and a wide pillow. Books are crammed into shelves against the wall, for easy access. In fact, books are stacked everywhere in the house, even under the bed.
Nowell sits on the pillow and works on a computer perched in the corner many hours each day. She's in contact with cat people all over the world. She answers students' questions about tigers, lynxes and cougars--any one of the 36 species of cat.
The modest office trappings mean low overhead for CAT. "Any money we receive for a project goes directly to the people doing the research," Nowell explains. CAT has matched funding of a quarter of a million dollars with 15 projects around the world. But securing money for these projects is always tough. "I send out letters, email, write articles, make speeches," Nowell explains.
They were able to connect funding from Sandy Lerner (the former Los Gatan who co-founded Cisco Systems with her husband) with the Andean mountain cat project. The result is that this rare cat, which lives very high in the Andes Mountains and has been seen just twice in living memory, is now on videotape. Its lifestyle, habitat and movement are on record. Researching these animals is relatively cheap, Nowell explains. The entire grant for one year was less than $25,000.
"When the researcher first saw the Andean cat, he started shaking and couldn't believe what he was videotaping," Nowell recalls. What was surprising was how completely unintimidated this cat was by humans. The video will be shown on CNN.
Nowell's connection to exotic countries began in Taiwan, when she decided to put her college major to work. She had majored in political science with an emphasis on endangered-species conservation. She was aware of Taiwan's notorious, illegal trade in rare animals, but as she strolled down to the National Taiwan University to volunteer for conservation, Nowell couldn't know the exotic intrigue ahead.
A professor at the university who'd received his Ph.D. from UC-Davis sent Nowell--still in her early 20s--along with a Chinese anthropologist, to stay with former headhunters, the Reukai tribe. These disenfranchised aboriginals had moved high up into the mountains as development of the cities encroached on their territories.
While Preisser battled the crowded streets of Taipei going to and from work, Nowell moved between 5,000 and 10,000 feet up into the mountains with the Reukai.
Then the anthropologist decided she didn't want to camp out after all and went home, leaving Nowell on her own.
There in the hills of Taiwan, Nowell made close friends while learning the complexities of conservation. These people were economically dependent on hunting wild animals and selling them to the Taiwanese. They had hunted the clouded leopard--now extinct in Taiwan--for their own ceremonial purposes, not for trade. Nowell explains that logging and the loss of habitat because of development were also a big factors in the extinction of Taiwan's only big cat. Loss of habitat is, worldwide, one of the biggest contributors to species' becoming extinct.
Nowell came to believe that the key to conservation is to listen to what people have to say about their economic needs, because economics is nearly always tied to the killing of rare animals. "You have to listen to people," she explains, "and not be dogmatic." As a result of what she's learned from her research, she has helped institute ecotourism and even the much more controversial trophy hunting as ways to help preserve animal species while still recognizing economic needs of the native populations.
Photograph courtesy of Kristin Nowell
Kristin Nowell and her husband, Tom Preisser, sit with their dog, Xams, during their time in Namibia.
In Namibia, for example, farmers were slaughtering cheetahs to protect their livestock. The ministry of Namibia instituted trophy hunting of cheetahs, which means the farmers can charge a fee to hunters for hunting on their land. It also means the government gets licensing fees. Thus the cheetahs become valuable to the farmers. Trophy hunting has also been instituted in Mongolia to help preserve the very rare snow leopard, which was being killed off by cashmere goat farmers.
Nowell explains that animal conservationists think in terms of saving a species and its habitat, taking into consideration the socioeconomics and culture of the region involved. The thinking of conservationists is that it's useless to pass laws against hunting wild animals without the support of the people. "[Otherwise] the hunting goes underground and a black market grows," Nowell says.
Trophy hunting is controversial, especially among animal rights activists. "They are more concerned with saving the individual animals," Nowell explains. To draw a comparison, she explains that animal rights activists would pay $50,000 to save Free Willy whereas conservationists would use that money for a broader program to save a species.
"Hunters are all right," Nowell explains. "They understand they can't shoot all the cheetahs."
Currently, though, U.S. hunters cannot bring their booty home because the cheetah is listed as an endangered species. So in January 1998, Nowell wrote a long, authoritative letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service requesting that the U.S. downgrade the cheetah's status from "endangered" to "threatened." This would allow cheetah hunters to bring their trophies home from Namibia. Rod Gabel, a branch chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Office of Scientific Authority, says a decision has been prepared but is still being studied by higher officials. He can't say what the recommendation will be. "It could still go either way," he explains, because trophy hunting is so controversial.
In Taiwan, however, Nowell's conservation efforts became intense when she saw tiger bones, rhinoceros horns, stuffed pandas and stuffed Amur leopards (only 30 of these left in the world) traded in Taipei.
The Taiwanese wanted this booty for several reasons--tiger bones and rhino horns for ancient Chinese medicine, various body parts for the prowess and power they supposedly give to one who eats them, and in status-conscious Taiwan, owning rare animal pelts or eating rare animals is a sign of power and wealth. Bear paw, for example, is an exotic dish that costs $1,400 a plate. The rare animal booty was coming from China.
Under the sponsorship of the TRAFFIC (Trade Records Analysis of Fauna and Flora in Commerce) division of the World Wildlife Fund, Nowell went undercover in China for six weeks to document the extent of illegal trade in endangered species between China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
"I would show taxi drivers pictures taken of tiger skins, panda skins, and other rare species," she explains, "and ask them where I could buy these things. I even gave them small bribes." In one case, after going through about 10 different people, Nowell recalls, "I took a bus ride with a group of four people far into the countryside of the Fujien Province. We met a farmer who took us out to his chicken coop. He pulled aside the hay and showed us burlap sacks that contained about 37 leopard pelts."
These were desperate times, Nowell says. "I was panicked because it seemed like no one was doing anything."
She used her understanding of conservation politics and lobbied President Clinton and Congress to enact the Pelly Amendment against Taiwan. The amendment allows the U.S. to place trade sanctions on countries that are violating endangered or threatened species laws.
The Clinton administration placed sanctions on Taiwan, according to Nowell, and the Taiwan government finally began to take its own laws prohibiting endangered species use in traditional medicines seriously. "Now you don't see rhino horns or tiger bones for sale there," Nowell claims. One Taiwanese told her, "We don't dare because we are afraid our government will make an example of us." Nowell doesn't deny that some level of illegal trade still goes on, but says it is greatly reduced from early in the decade.
Nowell helped establish the Wildlife Protection Unit in Taiwan, with 15 wildlife police officers across the island. It was created in direct response to the Pelly Amendment sanctions, and Taiwan is now a contributor to conservation causes all over the world.
In 1992 Preisser gave up his job in Taipei because Nowell was commissioned by the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism to go to Namibia to study cheetahs as part of a million-dollar program of ecological research being carried out in Etosha National Park.
The couple set up housekeeping in Namibia in a bungalow with a grass roof, a truck and an airstream trailer. "We spent most of our time in the truck," Nowell recalls. They were following cheetahs seven days a week, 24 hours a day. The purpose of this biological study was to find out how many antelope the cheetah were killing, because the antelope were dying in large numbers. For four years the twosome followed cheetahs around the park, which is about the size of Massachusetts. They became intimately involved with the big cats.
Nowell recalls times when the cats would wake up from one of their nine-hour naps and head out for a walk. When their two-legged friends didn't start following, the cheetahs would wait. "They would actually stop and turn their heads around as if to say, 'Come on, we're leaving now,' " Nowell remembers. One New Year's Eve she and her husband left the cheetah family they were following to celebrate with friends around a campfire. "We heard a noise and looked beyond the camp. Our cheetahs were lying a ways off and watching us."
The cheetahs weren't the only ones the couple became close to. They hooked up with a few of the Hai//om bushmen. (According to Nowell, the "//" is the so-called lateral click, like the sideways sucking click used for urging on a horse). Those of us who saw the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy will remember that sound, and yes, these are the same bushmen. "I actually saw the guy who starred in the movie," Nowell recalls. Though these bushmen had been evicted from the park some 40 years ago by those in charge of the park, a few still hang around. Nowell and Preisser learned a lot about survival from them.
"These people used to live alongside the cheetahs," Nowell says. "They knew how to do that." They told her that in their living memory, only one person had ever been attacked by a cheetah, a paraplegic who was crawling on the ground. "We humans are losing that ability," Nowell says, "and these bushmen won't be living much longer." Like the Reukai tribe, they, too, are disenfranchised natives who suffer from too much alcohol, smoking, malnutrition and tuberculosis.
Photograph by George Sakkestad
Kristin Nowell has collected various African artifacts during her four-year stay in Namibia on behalf of the world's wild cat population.
The two learned at least 100 words of the clicking and popping language. They would have learned more except for the constant quiet they had to maintain when following the cheetah.
What Nowell learned was that the antelope's biggest killer was anthrax, not cheetahs. The anthrax spores last a long time in the dry Namibia air. In fact, it was killing the cheetahs, too. They caught it from the antelope they killed. The seven cheetahs they had selected to study all died after Nowell and Preisser had gone.
There was another project that Nowell had been commissioned to do when she left Taiwan.
A huge project.
The World Conservation Union commissioned Nowell and well-known conservationist Peter Jackson to compile and organize data on all the wild cat species in the world. They managed to gather an amazing stock of literature from as far back as Marco Polo to the present. Their book--Wild Cats, status, survey and conservation action plan-- includes everything from the history of cats, a listing of each cat species, its dialectal names, behavior, biology, habitat and distribution, population status, maps of where they are found, protection status, principal threats, photographs of each species, a section on major issues in cat conservation and a cat action plan that lists 105 current and proposed projects in need of funding. The book was published in 1996 by Burlington Press, Cambridge, England.
It took five years to compile, and Nowell did most of her work while in Namibia. In fact, the postman at the remote office there got tired of the massive mailings Nowell handled. "So, he gave me a key, and I did all my own weighing and stamping at night when the office was closed," she explains.
It's the 105 projects included in this book that CAT is trying to fund. Some projects are in process and some waiting for funding. CAT matched Exxon funding for a recent project in Cambodia, where a young professor pulled together a cadre of students willing to go to places no biologist had been before. The students discovered a surprising 700 wild tigers in Cambodia, a significant number of the total wild tiger population in the world.
Nowell and Preisser will be traveling to Cambodia later this year. She also hopes to get back to Namibia and Taiwan before long. "I don't want to lose contact with my friends there," she explains.
In the meantime, they share their home with Xams (pronounced Hahms), a 5-year-old Yorkshire terrier they found in a Namibian pound. His name is from Hai//om and the X is pronounced like a ragged H, catching in your throat, like a lion's snarl. The name means "Little Lion." Xams has roamed with cheetahs, been chased by rhinos, and stepped on by an elephant. These days he rides around town on the back of Nowell's bike, and even trots into the cushy Saratoga bank with her.
Little did he know when he hooked up with Nowell that he would leave the dusty plains of Namibia for Silicon Valley. But those who hook up with Nowell never know where they will land.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
