“Run, baby, run…”

The cheetah is my favourite animal. It may not be the prettiest - most people prefer the leopard - but there’s nothing to beat the sight of a cheetah running at full speed. It never fails to make me smile…

And if you’re lucky enough to see a cheetah kill, that’s one of the most exciting moments you can ever get on safari!

If you want a few tips on how to shoot a tiger, just take a look at my blog post.

Basic facts

Order: Carnivora

Family: Felidae

Species: Cheetah

Scientific name: Acinonyx jubatus

Subspecies: southeast African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus jubatus), Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus), northeast African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus soemmeringii), northwest African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus hecki)

Mass: 21-72kg (adult)

Height: 67-94cm (adult, at shoulder)

Appearance: Cat with a relatively small head and a lithe body covered in pale brown fur with individual black spots all over it. They have black ‘tear marks’ on their faces, running from the eyes to the mouth on both sides.

Top speed: 70 mph

Gestation period: nearly three months

Lifespan: 10-12 years (eight years for males in the wild)

IUCN Red List Status: Vulnerable

Population: 6,674 mature individuals, decreasing

Habitat: Savannah, shrubland, grassland, desert

Distribution: north-west, eastern and southern Africa, Iran

Habitat

While there is a small population in Iran, most people think of the cheetah as being an African animal.

I’ve seen cheetahs in most of the main safari destinations in sub-Saharan Africa, including Botswana, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania and Namibia.

They’re generally found on the savannah, and they prefer to hunt on open areas with relatively few trees or bushes.

If you really want to see cheetahs, I recommend going to the Masai Mara in Kenya or the Serengeti in Tanzania.

Speed

The fact that most people know about the cheetah is that it’s the fastest land animal on Earth. It can run at up to 70 mph - although estimates range from 50-80 mph.

It also has incredible acceleration, being able to reach top speed in just three seconds, which is faster than most sports cars!

However, they’re sprinters rather than marathon runners, and the build-up of lactic acid in their muscles means they can only maintain high speeds for around 300 metres or 30 seconds. They also need to recover for around half an hour after every chase.

The key to their speed is that cheetahs have flexible spines. These act like springs, enabling their front and rear legs to overlap underneath their bodies when running at top speed. This results in a stride length of up to seven metres.

Hunting

Cheetahs hunt, kill and eat small to medium-sized mammals including the scrub hare, springbok, Thomson’s gazelle, common impala and blue wildebeest.

On average, cheetahs consume around 4 kg of meat a day.

It’s easier to see a cheetah kill than any other because they hunt during the day when lions and hyenas are often asleep. However, the chances of seeing one on any given game drive are still only around 2%!

Cheetahs initially stalk their prey. Ideally, they need to get within 45 metres on an open plain for any chase to be successful. If there are too many trees, bushes or other obstacles, they lose the advantage of their straight-line speed.

However, the cheetah is still very agile. This is partly based on the system of liquid-filled canals in the inner ear that acts like a gyroscopic stabiliser, allowing it to keep its head still—even while chasing prey that’s doing its best to get away by twisting and turning every which way.

When they get close enough, cheetahs trip up their prey with a paw or occasionally pull them down with their ‘dewclaw’ (or ‘dew claw’), which is an elevated vestigial first toe on the rear of the foot that remains sharp while the rest are worn down by running.

Once they have brought their prey down, cheetahs finish them off by grabbing their necks and throttling them to death.

I’ve seen half a dozen cheetah kills (and plenty more unsuccessful chases), and they don’t last very long at all. The action is usually all over in less than 10 seconds! Any longer than that, and the cheetah will normally give up.

Cheetahs are only successful in around half of their hunts (58% in one study), but their problems don’t end there.

They’re not the most muscular of the African predators, so they can’t defend their kills from lions or even hyenas and lose around 10% of them in this way.

As a result, cheetahs will usually drag the animal’s carcase to a sheltered spot in the shade of a tree or bush before eating it.

This happens in around 65% of cases, and they often travel a good distance: on average, it’s about 60m, but in one recorded case it was 700m!

Breeding

Cheetahs can breed throughout the year and have litters of between one and eight cubs - although three or four is most common.

Females have their first cubs when they are two or three years old while males can breed when they are slightly younger (although only in captivity).

Male cheetahs compete for access to the female, and this can lead to increased marking of territory and even fighting.

Once a male has achieved dominance, he’ll approach the female, who will lie on the ground.

There is no courtship behaviour. The male will simply bite the female’s neck and mate with her. This will happen three to five times a day for two or three days until they eventually part.

The female will raise her young on her own.

Cubs only weigh 150-300g at birth, and their eyes only open when they are 10 days old.

They start off with long, black fur with a silver-grey patch down their backs that might make them look enough like a honey badger to put off a few predators!

Only one in 20 cheetah cubs survive to adulthood, with lions accounting for more than half of cheetah cub deaths.

If they survive, cubs leave their mother when they’re 17-23 months old and try to establish territories of their own. This might be alone or in a coalition with one or more siblings or other cheetahs.

Territory

Cheetahs are solitary creatures, but males sometimes form ‘coalitions’ in order to hunt and hold territory more successfully.

The largest coalitions contain up to five males, and I’ve actually seen ‘The Five Musketeers’ kill a Coke’s hartebeest and eat it only a couple of feet from my vehicle!

Breeding males are territorial and occupy territories of up to 15-30 square miles, depending on the size and age of the males involved and whether it was a coalition or not.

Any male intruder who enters the territory of another is likely to be attacked or even killed.

Any female intruder will be surrounded by the local males, who will bite her if she tries to escape. This situation will often lead to mating.

Females tend to have much larger home ranges, but it depends on the availability of game.

in Phinda Game Reserve in South Africa, the females’ home ranges are 13-61 square miles, but in central Namibia, where prey animals are much harder to find, they’re 214-2,727 square miles!

The size of some of these territories means that cheetahs spend a lot of time walking around in search of food.

In the Kalahari Desert, a study showed the average distance travelled to be 6.8 miles per day at walking speeds of 1.6-2.4 mph.

Communication

Among the big cats, the cheetah is unique in that it doesn’t - and cannot - roar.

Like the humble tabby, they belong to the Felinae family of small cats rather than the Pantherinae, which means they have a fixed voice box with vocal cords rather than a larynx with large muscles and a long ‘vocal fold’.

As a result, cheetahs have to rely on a number of other vocalisations:

• Chirping

• Churring (or churtling)

• Purring

• Agonistic sounds, including bleating, coughing, growling, hissing, meowing and moaning (or yowling)

• Other, including a gurgle, a ‘nyam nyam’ sound, an ‘ihn ihn’ and a ‘prr prr’, a ‘whirr’ and a low-pitched alarm call

Cheetahs also communicate by means of scent.

It’s usually the males who mark their territory by urinating against trees or bushes, but females also do it, especially when in oestrus.

When cheetahs meet, they often sniff each other’s mouth, anus and genitals.

They will also groom each other, lick each other’s faces and rub cheeks.

Mothers also use their tails to ‘tell’ their cubs to follow them.

Threats

The world cheetah population is low and in decline. The IUCN deems the cheetah to be in its ‘vulnerable’ category, and it faces many threats to its existence, including habitat loss, conflict with humans, poaching and disease.

Sources: BBC, National Geographic, YPTE, Wikipedia, My Modern Met

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