Luke Hunter

Luke Hunter is considered one of the world’s leading experts on the conservation of endangered wild carnivores and their habitats. He is the Executive Director, Big Cats Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society (wcs.org) in New York; and he is one of the founding members of the NGO Panthera, and its former President & Chief Conservation Officer.

Hunter's chief interests are scaling up solutions to retaliatory killing of large carnivores by rural communities, improving the protection and management capacity of national parks and reserves, and reducing the impacts on cat populations of legal recreational hunting. In addition to delivering many dozens of public lectures and media interviews, he has authored/co-authored over 180 articles in scientific journals and popular media including for BioScience, National Geographic, New Scientist and Slate. He has written eight books including Cats of Africa: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation (2006), Wild Cats of the World (2015) and Field Guide to Carnivores of the World (2011), which has been fully revised and updated in a second edition (2018). He is deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of conservation leaders, and has supervised graduate students working around the world including on the felid guild in Borneo, small felids in Gabon and Uganda, jaguars in Brazil, and leopards in Gabon, Iran and South Africa.