Why Cheetahs Are Friendly (But Never Domesticated)

What the film says

1. Jahangir wrote in 1613 that his father Akbar once collected 1,000 cheetahs, and none of them bred.

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2. Akbar's favourite, Chitr Najan, earned a jewel-studded collar and a drum beaten before him after a hunt near Sanganer (Jaipur) in 1572.

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3. In ancient Egypt, tamed cheetahs were imported from the south. That Egyptians hunted with them is conjecture with no supporting evidence (Osborn & Osbornová).

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4. In 1613, Jahangir recorded a rare captive litter of three cubs after a male slipped its collar and mated with a female.

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5. The next known captive cheetah breeding was at the Philadelphia Zoo in 1956.

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6. In 1959, Dmitry Belyaev began selecting farm foxes (30 males and 100 vixens) for tameness alone. By the sixth generation, some foxes sought human contact and licked experimenters.

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7. The tame foxes developed traits seen in domestic animals, such as floppy ears and rolled or curled tails.

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8. Cheetahs purr.

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9. Cheetah cubs stay with their mother until about 18 months.

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10. Cheetahs reach top speeds of about 60–70 mph.

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11. A 1985 study found that 14 reciprocal skin grafts between unrelated cheetahs were accepted.

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12. Genome analysis points to two bottlenecks, one more than 100,000 years ago and one about 11,000–12,600 years ago.

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13. Cheetah genomes are about 95% homozygous on average, compared with 62.6% for an inbred Abyssinian cat.

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14. Sperm concentration was ten times lower in cheetahs than in domestic cats, and about 71% of cheetah sperm were abnormal.

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15. Free-ranging Namibian cheetahs were largely free of the diseases common in captivity, even though they are just as genetically impoverished.

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16. In males born from 1976 to 2007, heterozygosity did not correlate with semen quality in wild or captive cheetahs. Unexpectedly, proven breeders had lower heterozygosity.

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17. Female cheetahs almost always ovulate only when induced by mating. Their cycles are interrupted by anestrus that often lasts months.

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18. Wild males live in lifelong coalitions, usually of brothers. In captivity, coalition-housed males had better ejaculate quality and higher androgens than singletons.

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19. Only about 18% of captive male cheetahs have ever produced young.

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20. Males exposed to the public produced fewer motile sperm than off-display males.

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21. Since its first litter in 2010, the Smithsonian breeding program has had more than 80 cheetah births. Its methods include keeping males in coalitions, housing breeding females alone, monitoring fecal hormones, and listening for the males' 'stutter bark'.

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22. In 2011, cubs were born at just 33 of 241 facilities holding cheetahs (13.7%).

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23. By 1995, systemic amyloidosis turned up in 70% of necropsied captive cheetahs. Renal failure was a sole or partial cause of death in 74% of affected animals.

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24. Laurie Marker cared for cheetah cubs seized from traffickers in Somaliland, and one died.

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25. About 7,100 cheetahs remain in the wild.

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26. In 1901, a British naturalist recorded the shikaris' view that cheetahs should be caught as adults rather than as cubs, since they were useless for training until their parents had taught them to pull down prey.

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