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Cheetahs On The Edge

This story appears in the November 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Anticipation ripples through the crowd. Fingers tighten around binoculars. Camera lenses snap into focus. No fewer than 11 canopied safari buses, bright with tourists and bristling with long lenses, huddle near a solitary acacia tree in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. For the past half hour a mother cheetah named Etta has been sitting in the shade with her four young cubs, eyeing a herd of Thomson's gazelles that drifted into view on a nearby rise. Now she's up and moving, sidling toward the herd with a studied nonchalance that fools no one, least of all the gazelles, which are staring nervously in her direction.

Suddenly one of the guides shouts, as the gazelles break and run and Etta launches into an explosive sprint. The sleek cat is too fast for the eye to follow, blurring through the grass like a bullet. The drama is over in seconds, ending with a puff of dust and a stranglehold on a luckless young gazelle. As Etta drags the carcass back to her cubs, they emerge from the scrub eager to tuck into the feast. The safari buses are only seconds behind, the drivers jockeying to get the best camera angles for their customers.

Cheetahs have come to occupy a curious place in the human imagination. Beautiful and exotic, sports car fast and famously docile, they are as much media stars as denizens of the wild, darlings of filmmakers and advertisers the world over. Tap "cheetah" and "images" into your computer's search bar, and more than 20 million results pop up—from fashion shoots to flashy car ads to photos of pet cheetahs riding in the backseats of Mercedes convertibles.

All this pop culture presence might create the impression that cheetahs are as secure in nature as they are in the popular imagination. They are not. In fact, cheetahs are the most vulnerable of the world's big cats, surprisingly rare and growing steadily rarer. A few centuries ago cheetahs roamed from the Indian subcontinent to the shores of the Red Sea and throughout much of Africa. As fleet of foot as they are, though, they couldn't outrun the long reach of humanity. Today the Asiatic cheetah, the elegant subspecies that once graced the royal courts of India, Persia, and Arabia, is all but extinct. In Africa cheetah numbers plummeted by more than 90 percent during the course of the 20th century, as farmers, ranchers, and herdsmen crowded the cats out of their habitat, hunters shot them for sport, and poachers captured cubs for the lucrative trade in exotic pets. In all, fewer than 10,000 cheetahs survive in the wild today.

Even within Africa's great game parks, cheetahs are under heavy pressure. Shy and delicately built, the only big cats that cannot roar, they are bullied into the margins by lions, which are far stronger both in body and number. Consider Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and the adjoining Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. Taken together the two parks are home to more than 3,000 lions, an estimated 1,000 leopards, and a mere 300 cheetahs. And despite their celebrity status, cheetahs lose out to lions in the tourism stakes as well. "Cheetahs tend to be something people look for on their second safari," says guide Eliyahu Eliyahu. "The first time around is all about seeing lions. The trouble is, where you have a big lion population, you will never have many cheetahs."

If cheetahs seem a breed apart, it's because they are. Not only are they a separate species from the other great cats, but they belong to a separate genus as well, a genus with just one member: themselves. Their genus name, Acinonyx, comes from Greek words for "thorn" and "claw" and refers to the cheetah's curious semi-retractable claw, a feature they share with no other cat. Unlike lions and leopards, whose fully retractable claws are tools designed for tearing flesh and climbing trees, cheetahs have claws that are more like the spikes on a sprinter's track shoe and serve a similar function: solid grip and quick acceleration.

Everything about a cheetah is designed for speed—pure, raw, explosive speed. Put a cheetah and a Lamborghini side by side on a freeway, and it will be an even-money bet which will smash the speed limit first. Both can do zero to 60 in under three seconds, but the cheetah can crack 45 miles an hour in the first couple of strides. And what strides. Thanks to its flexible spine and long, fluid legs, a cheetah can gobble up turf in bounds that exceed 25 feet. An elite human athlete who could leap that far even once, after a good run, would be well on his or her way to qualifying for the Olympic Games. A cheetah sprinting at top speed might be doing that up to four times a second.

Such superhuman abilities lent cheetahs an otherworldly aura in ancient times. Egyptians were the first people to tame them as pets and immortalize them in images on tombs and temples, nearly 4,000 years ago. In India, Iran, and Arabia, coursing with cheetahs—or "hunting leopards," as they were known—became an immensely popular sport among the aristocracy. In the courts of the Mogul emperors, cheetahs became a kind of motif, celebrated in paintings and tapestries, folklore and verse. Favorite cheetahs were adorned with jeweled collars and featured prominently in royal processions.

Cheetahs remain highly fashionable in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, where a cub can fetch upwards of $10,000. "A rich, young man buys himself a cheetah to go with his sports car," says Mordecai Ogada, a Kenyan wildlife biologist who has studied cheetah-human relationships and wildlife trafficking. "It's typically a new-money thing nowadays."

In places such as the United Arab Emirates cheetahs occupy a kind of legal limbo. "The importation is clandestine," says Ogada, "but once there, the trade is open. Trafficked cheetahs can easily be 'laundered' and made to appear as though they were legally bred in captivity. It's difficult to determine the source of cubs unless you do genetic analysis and identify them as members of a subspecies that's endemic to a particular area."

How great a toll trafficking is taking on the world's dwindling cheetah population is anyone's guess, but evidence suggests that trade in wild cheetah cubs is a large-scale enterprise. Even a cursory trawl of the Internet turns up plenty of cubs being offered for sale by "breeders" in places like Dubai. Several cheetah smugglers were arrested last year in Tanzania and Kenya, and there were rumors of cheetah cubs being offered for sale as far afield as Cameroon.

"I suspect the problem is bigger than we imagine," says Yeneneh Teka, head of Ethiopia's Wildlife Development and Protection Directorate. "There is a great deal of money involved, and like the people who are smuggling drugs and guns, those who smuggle wildlife have well-established networks."

Last year Ethiopian authorities cracked down on wildlife smuggling and instituted a training program for border guards and customs officials. The stepped-up enforcement paid off when officials intercepted a consignment of cheetah cubs as they were being smuggled into Somalia.

"While the border guards were examining the truck's paperwork, they heard scratching sounds coming from a jerry can that was supposed to be full of petrol," Teka says. "When they opened it up, they found five tiny cheetah cubs in very poor condition." One of the cubs died. The other four, after weeks of veterinary care, were taken to a wildlife sanctuary operated by the Born Free Foundation an hour north of Addis Ababa, where they will spend the rest of their lives. Although it's a happy ending for the four survivors, it's a net loss for the species.

"They'll never be able to return to the wild," says Ogada. "Even if you could teach them to hunt, humans can't teach cubs how to recognize and avoid predators such as lions and hyenas." And although some cheetahs have been successfully rewilded on large, fenced reserves in South Africa, the wide-open grasslands are a far more dangerous place to grow up. Orphaned cubs "wouldn't stand a chance in a place like the Serengeti," says Ogada.

Even mother cheetahs find it difficult to raise cubs in the wild, where mortality among cubs can run as high as 95 percent. The great majority of cubs may never make it out of the den in which they're born. They're killed in raids by lions or hyenas, or they die of exposure, or they're abandoned by mothers that aren't skillful enough hunters to support them. Indeed, many female cheetahs go their entire lives without raising a single cub to maturity.

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There are a rare few, however, that somehow manage to beat the odds and enjoy astonishing success in raising cubs, some even fostering the offspring of other females. Superb hunters and wise in the ways of the bush, these supermoms manage to make a kill nearly every day while keeping their brood safe on the wide-open stage of the African grasslands, beneath the very noses of lions and hyenas. One such supermom, a seven-year-old named Eleanor, is known to have mothered at least 10 percent of all the adult cheetahs in the southern Serengeti.

"I'm not aware of any other carnivore whose survival relies so heavily on the success of so few females," says Sarah Durant of the Zoological Society of London. Durant directs the Serengeti Cheetah Project, one of the world's longest running carnivore studies. Now in its 38th year, the project has chronicled the lives and maternal pedigrees of generations of the Serengeti's cheetahs. It is hot, dusty work, involving long hours bouncing over the grasslands in hard-bitten Land Rovers seeking out the most elusive of Africa's great cats. It was Durant's painstaking research that revealed the vital importance of supermoms.

Though the matriarchal lines of the Serengeti's cheetah population are now well documented, paternity is another matter. Wildlife biologist Helen O'Neill waits patiently in her Land Rover a short distance from where three cheetah brothers—Mocha, Latte, and Espresso, known collectively as the Coffee Boys—lie sprawled in the shade of a ballanite tree. O'Neill is on what is delicately referred to as "poop patrol," collecting feces dropped by specific, identifiable cheetahs. Scientists at the Zoological Society of London are able to extract DNA samples and hope to fill in the paternal side of the Serengeti's family trees.

Analysis so far suggests that cheetah females are far more promiscuous than anyone suspected: In as many as half their litters, the cubs have different fathers. "We suspect this kind of multiple mating could have genetic benefits in an uncertain environment," says Durant. "Think of it as bet hedging by the cheetah mothers to try to ensure that some of their progeny survive."

A world away from the sunlit grasslands of the Serengeti, late on a cold, clear winter's afternoon, a lone male cheetah picks his way along a snow-dusted ridgeline. He pauses briefly to scent mark a tamarisk tree, then slinks out of view of the remotely operated video camera that has been recording his passage.

The concealed camera is one of 80 camera traps that have been deployed around the Dasht-e Kavir, a remote region in Iran's mountainous central plateau, in the hopes of glimpsing one of the world's rarest and most elusive big cats: the Asiatic cheetah.

"It's like a dream come true when we get something like this," says Iranian wildlife biologist Houman Jowkar of the 27 seconds of footage. Jowkar is with the Conservation of the Asiatic Cheetah Project, which was set up by Iran's Department of Environment in 2001 in a bid to save the last remaining population of these endangered cheetahs. "These cats are incredibly rare," says Jowkar. "We have game wardens who have lived and worked in these mountains for years but have never seen a live cheetah."

The camera-trap program has helped Iranian scientists determine roughly how many cheetahs are left and where they live—vital information for developing a conservation strategy. "We're lucky these beautiful cats are spotted," Jowkar says. "By using their unique coat patterns, we can identify them individually and work out their population and distribution."

All the same, saving the Asiatic cheetah will be a tall order. Its downfall traces back to the glory days of the Mogul Empire, when hunting with cheetahs became all the rage. One Mogul emperor is said to have collected more than 9,000 cheetahs during his 49-year reign.

Compare then and now. In ten years of setting out scores of cameras, Iranian researchers have so far managed to obtain a mere 192 fleeting images. Those images document 76 gaunt individuals, pretty much all that remains of a noble subspecies of cheetah that once roamed throughout much of Asia. Today's survivors eke out a precarious existence. Stalking antelope and mountain sheep on steep, stony slopes, they compete with wolves and even humans, for whom gazelles and sheep are also a handy food source.

"They are living on a knife edge, at the very limit of what is ecologically possible," says Luke Hunter, president of Panthera, an international conservation group dedicated to preserving big cats, and a collaborator on the Iranian cheetah project. "What's intriguing, though, is that these cheetahs have not been pushed into these mountains recently. They've been here for thousands of years. People don't realize how tough and versatile cheetahs really are."

Indeed they are. Despite their vulnerability, cheetahs are one of the world's hardiest and shrewdest survivors, enduring both the bitter winters of the Iranian steppes and the scorching heat of the Sahara wadis. "They are not just fast," says Algerian wildlife biologist Farid Belbachir, who has been setting camera traps in Algeria's Ahaggar Mountains, trying to capture images of the critically endangered Saharan cheetah. "They understand the landscape. They've figured out how to use the narrow parts of the wadis to launch their attacks, to give their prey less opportunity to escape."

Back in Serengeti National Park, it's now in the shank of the afternoon, with the hot taste of dust in the air and thunderheads tumbling and billowing along the horizon. For the past hour or so Etta has been creeping up on a big male gazelle, drawing to within 40 yards of him, while he has remained oblivious to her presence.

"It's too early to tell if Etta is going to turn out to be a supermum," Durant says. "This is only her first litter. But the fact that she has brought four cubs out of the den and has raised them this far is an encouraging sign."

The gazelle is big and healthy, with a lot of meat on him. Etta takes another couple of quick, furtive steps forward, then crouches and waits, looking like a sprinter on the starting blocks, poised and ready for the gun.

A tense minute crawls by, then another. Suddenly, and seemingly for no reason at all, Etta just stands up and strolls away. Something doesn't feel right to her—a whiff of hyena on the breeze or maybe the scent of lions. Whatever it is, to a mother of four young cubs alone on the Serengeti, one fat gazelle isn't worth the risk. She beckons to her cubs to come along, and together they trot off into the violet haze.

Cheetahs To Prowl India For First Time In 70 Years

Namibia has one of the world's largest populations of cheetahs

For the first time in 70 years, India's forests will be home to cheetahs.

Eight of them are set to arrive in August from Namibia, home to one of the world's largest populations of the wild cat.

Their return comes decades after India's indigenous population was declared officially extinct in 1952.

The world's fastest land animal, the cheetah can reach speeds of 70 miles (113km) an hour.

Classified as a vulnerable species under the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species, only around 7,000 are left in the wild worldwide.

Officials announced the agreement after spending the past two years working on how to transport the animals after India's supreme court decided in 2020 that they could be reintroduced in a "carefully chosen location".

The first arrivals will make their home in the state of Madhya Pradesh at Kuno-Palpur National Park, selected for its cheetah-friendly terrain.

The timing of the move is expected to occur as the nation celebrates 75 years of independence.

"Completing 75 glorious years of independence with restoring the fastest terrestrial flagship species, the cheetah, in India, will rekindle the ecological dynamics of the landscape," India's environment minister, Bhupender Yadav, said in a social media post.

Despite the animal's lightning-quick speeds, a combination of hunting, habitat loss and food scarcity led to the cheetah's disappearance in India. It is the only large mammal to become extinct in the country since its independence from British rule.

The Asiatic Cheetah could once be found in areas stretching from the Arabian Peninsula to Afghanistan.

It is now known only to survive in Iran. In 2022 government officials there reported that they believed only 12 were still alive.

Efforts have been made to revive India's cheetah numbers since the 1950s. An attempt to bring them from Iran in the 1970s - when Iran had around 300 of the animals - failed after negotiations ended when the Shah was deposed in the Iranian Revolution.

Indian officials are keen for this most recent attempt to succeed long term.

"The main goal of the cheetah reintroduction project is to establish viable cheetah metapopulation in India that allows the cheetah to perform its functional role as a top predator," said the country's environment ministry.

Inside India's Plan To Bring Back Extinct Cheetahs

One of the cheetahs bound for India in a quarantine facility in South Africa

Next week, a group of cheetahs are finally expected to make a long journey from Africa to their new home in a sprawling national park in India.

The world's fastest land animal is poised to make a comeback in India, more than half a century after it became extinct in the country.

This is the first time a large carnivore is being moved from one continent to another and being reintroduced in the wild. "It is exciting, it's challenging. It's a big feather in India's cap to restore a lost treasure," says Yadvendradev Jhala, dean of the Wildlife Institute of India, and one of the experts tasked with the effort.

Where are the cheetahs coming from?

At least 16 cheetahs are coming to India from South Africa and Namibia, home to more than a third of the world's 7,000 cheetahs. More than half of the world's cheetah population are found in these two countries and Botswana.

In South Africa, cheetahs are found in three different places: a small and declining number are free roaming, living in unprotected areas; a larger, stable population live in large national parks; and the remainder in smaller groups in fenced - mostly privately owned - protected reserves.

The India-bound cats have been mostly picked up from the reserves, where they breed well. There are some 500 adult cheetahs in 50-odd such reserves in South Africa.

The world's fastest land animal is poised to make a comeback in India

Veterinarians fired tranquiliser darts from moving helicopters to capture some of these cheetahs. "Some of them were slightly wilder," muses Vincent van der Merwe, a cheetah conservationist in South Africa who was involved the mission.

After capture, the tranquilised cats were microchipped, injected with antibiotics to prevent infection, rehydrated with drips, had their blood taken for DNA and then were put in crates and flown to quarantine facilities.

The cheetahs, including more than six females, are young animals in prime breeding age. "They are cats who have already left their mothers and fully capable of surviving themselves," says Mr van der Merwe.

Where are the cheetahs now?

The South African cheetahs are now in two quarantine enclosures in a veterinary facility in Rooiiberg and the Phinda game reserve in Zululand. Four others are in Namibia.

A leopard bounding towards a cheetah in South Africa

They have been tested for a number of diseases and vaccinated against at least six, including rabies, blood parasites and herpes. In quarantine, the cheetahs are monitored and observed to ensure that that they have no diseases of concern, says Mr van der Merwe.

How challenging is the long journey?

Experts say wild cheetahs can be difficult to transport as they get stressed by closeness to humans and confinement in crates.

The cheetahs bound for India will have to endure a long flight on a cargo plane from Johannesburg to Delhi and then onwards by road or helicopters to Kuno national park in Madhya Pradesh state, their new home.

A cheetah bound for India anaesthetised after capture

The cats will be immobilised with tranquilisers on the day of the journey and put in metal crates in the plane along with wildlife specialists, including a vet.

Once in the crates, the cheetahs will be given an antidote to wake them up from the anaesthetic, but also a mild tranquiliser to keep them awake and calm during the journey. "This has made it much easier to transport these animals," says Adrian Tordiffe, a veterinary wildlife professor at the University of Pretoria.

Cheetahs have been transported long distances in the past. Mr van der Merwe says he transported a female cheetah in the back of a vehicle on a 55-hour-road journey from South Africa to Malawi. "They are very adaptable animals."

Will the cheetahs be fed during the air journey?

Cheetahs feed once - usually 15kg of meat - every three days. In South Africa, for example, cheetahs are mainly fed common warthogs, although they prefer medium-size antelopes.

Feeding a cheetah before a long journey can be risky and lead to the cat falling sick and choking on its vomit.

The India-bound cheetahs will not be fed for two days before the journey, says Mr van der Merwe.

The African cheetahs will be relocated to India's Kuno national park

What will the cheetahs do after they arrive here?

The cats will be initially quarantined for at least a month in a fenced camp in the Kuno national park.

This is not for breeding but to anchor them to a central area. "All cats have homing instincts, and they are inclined to walk back home to where they came from. We break that by putting them up in holding facilities for one or two months," says Mr van der Merwe.

After that, the cheetahs will be released in the 115,000-hectare national park.

What are the challenges the cheetahs might face?

They can limit the population by killing cheetah cubs, especially in the Kuno national park.

Cheetahs are delicate animals, meant for speed. They avoid conflict, and are targeted by competing predators.

The cheetahs coming to India have been exposed to lions, leopards, hyenas and wild dogs at home. In Kuno, they will have their first encounters with sloth bears, striped hyenas and wolves.

There are some 7,000 cheetahs worldwide

Their main prey base in India will be spotted and large deer and the Indian gazelle, and the four-horned antelope.

"So we believe that they are experienced enough to handle any dangerous interactions with the leopards in Kuno," says Mr van der Merwe.

Also, in unfenced reserves like Kuno there is also a possibility that the cheetahs can disperse in any direction and becoming isolated. This will be managed by either satellite or VHF tracking collars to bring them back to the central area.

"The cheetahs do seem to settle down after a while and we have strategies in place to keep the males, in particular, anchored to the initial release site using scent markings etc," says Prof Tordiffe.

Relocation of animals is always fraught with risks.

"We are taking animals out of a familiar environment and it takes time for them to really feel comfortable in their new habitat. It is true that cheetahs are known to have lower survival rates after reintroductions than other large carnivores," says Prof Tordiffe.

But he points out to a well-documented reintroduction of cheetahs in Malawi where 80% of the adult cheetahs were still alive after a year and that their population managed to grow quite successfully despite the loss of 20% of the cats in the first year.

How does India plan to sustain a cheetah population?

Some Indian conservationists remain sceptical of the idea, saying that most of the country's former cheetah habitats are shrinking because of pressure on land.

Officials like Mr Jhala are more optimistic and believe the Kuno park has sufficient space, ample prey and less pressure of human population, all key to the cheetah's survival.

India is looking at a capacity population of 20 cheetahs in Kuno national park.

The cheetah is the world's fastest land animal

In five to six years, the country plans to import and locate 50 to 60 cheetahs in half-a-dozen reserves and parks across the country and move the animals around for genetic and and demographic diversity.

Why is this a globally important project?

Experts say this is a key experiment in conservation of the cheetah.

There are only about 12 Asiatic cheetahs left in the wild in Iran. A recent genetic survey revealed that these animals are highly inbred.

"It is, in my view, ridiculous to have any hope of reviving that little isolated population from such a small base. Trying to conserve subspecies like that is a waste of effort and has little chance of success. It is better to focus on the global population even if that means allowing some level of hybridisation, says Prof Tordiffe.

"The cheetah reintroduction into India is a bold step in terms of conservation and one that is desperately needed if we are to have any chance of saving this species from extinction."

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