[CAT] "Cheetahs Are Hard"

[rfmcdonald]

Vice's Motherboard carried Kaleigh Rogers' article looking at the problems faced by a cheetah breeding centre in Virginia. Apparently cheetahs behave quite differently from other cats, making an already difficult task of breeding captive populations to compensate for the decline of wild ones even more difficult.

Cheetahs don’t roar, like other big cats. They purr.

It’s a deep, rumbling vibration that is simultaneously tranquil and terrifying. You can sense their calm, but you can also sense their power. I was transfixed as I listened to Nick, a five-year-old male cheetah, purring happily inches from my face on the other side of a chain-link fence.

It was a cold, grey day in the hills of Virginia, more than 7,000 miles away from the cheetah’s natural habitat in the dry grasslands of sub-Saharan Africa. Nick paced the fence line, my view of him obscured by some plastic slats woven through the links.

“He’s really hard to get pictures of because he’s always right on the fence,” explained Adrienne Crosier, a biologist and the head of the cheetah breeding program at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) in Front Royal. She told me Nick, hand-reared for a few weeks as a newborn, is particularly fond of people.

“He always wants to come see you,” she said, Nick’s purr thrumming continuously.

Nick has spent his entire life in these hills at SCBI, where 21 endangered species are bred and researched. The cheetah program is considered one of the facility’s biggest success stories. Over the last five years, SCBI has been responsible for bringing 34 healthy cheetah cubs into the world and contributing a wealth of scientific research to our understanding of the species. The goal is to gain knowledge that will help conserve cheetahs in the wild. Because of their nomadic nature and vast territories, studying cheetahs in situ has always been a difficult task, and a large portion of what we now know about the species—their health, fertility, endocrinology, genetics—came from research done on captive cats.

But there are conservationists who question whether this strategy does much to help the wild population. With just an estimated 10,000 cheetahs remaining in the wild and everything from habitat destruction, to conflicts with farmers and the exotic pet trade threatening the species’s survival, is this strategy the most effective way to protect these cats? What good is a friendly cheetah in Virginia to the ones facing extinction in the wild?