Cheetah

The cheetah is what happens when evolution optimises an animal for one thing: the sprint. Every part of its body has been reshaped for acceleration and top speed, and the trade-offs that came with that specialisation now make it one of Africa’s most vulnerable big cats.

Overview

Cheetahs live in open and lightly wooded country — savanna, grassland, scrub and desert margins — across eastern and southern Africa, with a critically small population of Asiatic cheetahs hanging on in Iran. They need space: home ranges can exceed 1,000 km², far larger than other African cats, and much of their historical range is now farmland or fenced.

Built for speed

The cheetah’s body reads like an engineering brief for a sprinter:

• A long, flexible spine that flexes and extends like a spring, adding reach to each stride. At full speed a cheetah covers 7 m per bound and has all four feet off the ground twice per stride.
• Semi-retractable claws that grip like running spikes.
• An enlarged heart, lungs and nasal passages to move oxygen fast.
• A long, muscular tail used as a counterweight and rudder for sharp turns at speed.
• A small, light head and a lean frame — cheetahs are the lightest of the big cats.

The cost is that a cheetah cannot fight. It is not strong enough to defend a kill or itself against a lion, hyena or even a determined baboon troop.

Diet and hunting

Cheetahs hunt by day, especially early morning and late afternoon, partly to avoid larger nocturnal predators. A hunt has three phases: a slow stalk to within 60–70 m, an explosive acceleration, and a chase that is usually over within 20 seconds. The cheetah trips the prey with a dew claw, then suffocates it with a throat bite.

The sprint raises the cheetah’s body temperature sharply and leaves it panting heavily. It must rest 5–20 minutes before feeding, and it eats quickly, often abandoning the carcass rather than defending it.

Typical prey includes Thomson’s gazelle, impala, springbok, young wildebeest, hares and ground birds.

Behaviour and social life

Cheetah society is unusual among cats. Females are solitary and raise cubs alone. Males often live in coalitions — usually brothers from the same litter — that hold a territory together and have better access to females and food than a lone male.

Cheetahs are not very territorial toward each other by big-cat standards and use raised landmarks such as termite mounds and fallen trees as scent-marking and lookout posts.

Reproduction and life cycle

After a gestation of about 90–95 days, a female gives birth to a large litter — commonly 3 to 5 cubs, sometimes up to 8. Cub mortality is extreme in areas with many lions and hyenas: in parts of the Serengeti, over 90% of cubs die before independence, most killed by other predators at the den.

Surviving cubs stay with their mother for 15–18 months, learning to hunt, before the littermates leave together. The sisters then split off one by one; the brothers usually stay together for life.

Threats and conservation

The cheetah is listed as Vulnerable, with roughly 6,500 mature individuals left and numbers falling. Because cheetahs range so widely and at low density, more than three-quarters live outside protected areas, which makes them unusually exposed to:

• Habitat loss and fragmentation that cuts populations off from one another and shrinks the prey base.
• Conflict with farmers over livestock.
• The illegal pet trade, which takes a heavy toll on cubs smuggled out of the Horn of Africa.
• Low genetic diversity: cheetahs passed through a population bottleneck thousands of years ago and are strikingly inbred, which may reduce fertility and disease resistance.