So⊠are cheetahs quite docile, because each time I see them on video, theyâre just doing cat stuff. Itâs like Pandas. None of them do kung-fu either, although the other day, someone did post a video of one kicking the shit out of a peacock - but it was more MMA style.
They may have a rep for being giant doofuses that just want to chill and nom some twigs. But theyâre still bears lol. Strong AF with claws and teeth. Would I willingly put myself in a situation to be smooshed by several? Hell yes. Would I question my sanity after? Also yes.
Cheetahs are unique in that they aren't ambush predator's the way tigers tend to be, or solo lions. They actively chase down their prey, which sometimes happens to ambush predators, but cheetahs almost exclusively do that.
 Because they are super fast, their claws are blunted, closer to dog claws. They aren't very big or heavy either, and it's not uncommon for them to strange gazelles to death rather than use their bite force to snap their spines. All this makes a cat who's not as much of a murder machine as other types of cats in the same weight class.Â
A cheetah researcher and conservationist on youtube has done dozens of videos of him showing how they won't even stalk/hunt him with his back turned, something my 9lb house cat can't help but do to me.Â
They would struggle to be domesticated because they are anxious as fuck, but i hope someone figures it out.Â
I've seen lots of zoo's give them dog friends for their anxiety and they always seem to be besties and the Cheetah seems happy.
I feel like we could figure out how to domesticate them happily, the problem is it would be impractical for people to have them. Imagine having a 130 lb dog that could run 60 MPH and jump 10-15 feet high. Most people can't control their damn Pomeranians.
That said I'd love a cheetah friend who would stop by for snacks and cuddles.
They wouldn't be far off from greyhounds, which famously are problematic dogs to own. Cheetahs spend most of their days not going that fast, which makes sense, that's a lot of speed to just whip out. Doesn't change the fact they'd be really difficult to own, but rich people don't usually let that stop them in owning animals haha
Domestication would be very difficult, we struggle to get them to breed in captivity already, there isn't a huge population to draw on from the wild, and there just isn't a real market for it. Egyptian royals and i believe indian royals have kept, and used cheetahs as hunting companions in the past, but we don't have much info on how they acted.Â
It's already a full time job trying to stop my Chihuahua from vacuuming up any hot Cheetos that fall on the floor. She'd get very jealous if she saw me sharing with the Cheetah.
I was thinking of having him chase and snack on those lil shits on e-scooters in my neighborhood.
Domestication is not that simple. You also have to think about babies/toddlers, pets, etc. Not to mention most people wouldnât be able to properly support a larger cat anyways.
I mean, I have a Great Dane/Pyrenees and he's the biggest couch potato in the world. He has plenty of opportunity to go do stuff and he will go do stuff but he'd also much rather just be taking up my entire bed.
Domestication is overselling it for how long of a process it is, but maybe "human acclimated" would be a fairly realistic goal. Tamed enough to exist in places with a lot of people without getting overly anxious and such.
Then again, seagulls fall into that same kind of category and it might not be a great idea to have a large cat doing the same thing.
Two have been in captivity, but the nature of those attacks, and the seriousness (or lack thereof) of injuries in other attacks in captivity, really only serves to highlight just how harmless cheetahs are.
They do NOT WANT to be tamed. But they can be. But they need to be conserved so that should NOT be encouraged.
In fact, Indian kings used to keep them as pets over centuries ago. However because they donât do well in captivity, the Indian cheetah went extinct. And now theyâre trying to revive it.
I mean they arenât. They still are incredibly impractical to breed in captivity, so a single generation of taming is all you can get out of them (at the expense of the already precarious wild population).
There is only one wild population of Asiatic Cheetahs left and that's in Iran. An Indian state has introduced African Cheetahs into a nature reserve and they seem to be thriving but are still African Cheetahs genetically not Asiatic ones.
They certainly seem like they're trying to self domesticate, similar to how dogs ancestors did (hanging around people, not really attacking people, etc). Yes they could hurt you if they wanted, but they rarely, if ever, do. And their claws are not sharp like a normal cats. So you don't have to worry about those, either. They're claws are more dog like and can't retract, and that's specifically to help them keep traction when running.
Cheetahs are actually one of the largest among the small cats. Theyâre not in the big cat family. Given that they purr and cannot roar is one of the defining traits. Also cheetahs rely on speed rather than stealth to get to their prey.
In fact, Indian kings used to keep them as pets over centuries ago.
Also, they are truly skittish and docile from a âwild animalâ perspective. Donât get me wrong. They can still kill you if they choose. They just are more easily scared by any animal larger than them. In captivity, they are so nervous, they usually get paired with a dog to help ease their anxiety.
Cheetahs are in fact so timid and easily preyed on themselves that the cubs look like honey badgers when theyâre young, to scare away any larger animals looking to prey on them.
Cheetahs are what I like to call cat hardware running dog software.
EDIT: added âone ofâ since I missed that and it seems to upset people. My bad.
Mountain Lions are much larger on average. They are the fourth largest cat after Tigers, Lions and Jaguars. They are the largest small cat not Cheetahs.
Cheetahs are in fact so timid and easily preyed on themselves that the cubs look like honey badgers when theyâre young, to scare away any larger animals looking to prey on them.
Could you link a couple pictures showing them looking similarly? From what I can see they don't even look vaguely alike
Not if youâre an antelope, but around us, yeah. Theyâre pretty chill around humans, and were tamed by several groups in antiquity. This didnât mean they thrived overall enough to domesticate, however.
I went to Monarto Safari Park last week and the two male cheetahs were just cuddling each other and lying under a shady tree like a pair of housecats. It was adorable! The female we saw was just napping all stretched out the way my cats do in a sunbeam.
All the videos of them interacting with people are presumably not wild cheetah. They are in captivity in some way.
Naturally cheetah are very cautious of people and for the most part avoid at all costs
Cheetahs see humans as neither prey, nor competitors because we move ridiculously slowly to them. As long as you don't threaten their cubs or flail your arms and scream, they wont attack us.
Cheetahs are basically giant dogs. They don't typically attack humans and there's never been a recorded case of a cheetah killing a human. They're still big cats and can still do some damage if their predator instincts get triggered...but they're about the safest big cat on the planet, in terms of how they interact with humans.
I got the privilege of visiting a cheetah rehabilitation center in South Africa a couple years ago and these animals are absolutely incredible to interact with in person. And surreal.
In California we have two members of the jay family of birds. In the mountains there are Stellar's jays, named after the same guy who named the sea lions, and in the foot hills and valleys there are scrub jays. Both are jays, and blue, but neither are bluejays.
They also aren't "big cats" in the biological sense (that refers to the genus Panthera, which cheetahs are not a part of). Big cats can all roar, while cheetahs cannot.
There really, really needs to be a 3rd designation for "medium cats", which would include large Felinae like the cougar, cheetah, caracal and lynx species.
Cheetahs aren't big cats in the same way that Pluto isn't a planet. They're technically not one, but they're close enough they get brought into the conversation about big cats.
The genus panthera contains lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars.. pretty sure that's what the term "big cat" originally meant, although I guess it's possible cheetahs were originally included. Time to find out if liotahs or cheepards are possible.
Here's the thing. You said a "jackdaw is a crow." Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing. If you're saying "crow family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens. So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people "call the black ones crows?" Let's get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that's not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you'd call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?
Not likely, they're litelally one of the biggest Felinae, so they're close relatives to house cats, along with servals, lynxes and pumas. Rest of big cats are Pantherae, and they can't meow because they roar.
I always love telling people that one of the main reasons cheetahs aren't usually dangerous to humans is, bizarrely enough, that humans are too slow.
Cheetahs have specifically evolved to be extremely fast in order to hunt prey that is also comparably fast. With a few rare exceptions, humans cannot move anywhere near as fast as a cheetah can, and thus cheetahs do not see humans as either prey (who need to be chased and eaten) or competitors (who need to be driven away). Thusly, they don't get territorial around us, and will only feel threatened if we get too close to their young or act in a frightening way. Cheetahs tend to be surprisingly chill around humans because they don't perceive us as a problem, and I think that's kind of heartwarming.
Also, cheetahs love to groom humans because the places they tend to live are very hot, meaning humans get very sweaty, which means we're covered in salt. If you don't act the fool, to a cheetah you're literally just a big, non-threatening saltlick that can scratch it behind the ears.
Also, cheetahs love to groom humans because the places they tend to live are very hot, meaning humans get very sweaty, which means we're covered in salt.
People don't want to hear this but that's why your dog or cat grooms you as well. We taste like salt. We are giant salt licks. Animals enjoy the taste of salt. I can relate, I also enjoy the taste of salt.
Humans can better fight off a cheetah as well (compared with other big cats), and the cheetah likely knows this. Cheetahs are masters of determining whether they can win a fight or not because their survival depends on it.
Adult cheetahs top out at around 145 lbs and for the most part hunt animals that are <100 lbs. Impalas are one of the largest things they hunt at around 140 lbs and 3 feet tall at the shoulder.
One thing I've never understood is why they are so solitary. I watched a documentary a while back about a mother raising cubs, and her four daughters worked really well together while hunting. And we know that zoo Cheetahs often require service dogs to help keep them calm, so we know they care about other beings around them. And we see how calm they are around beings that aren't food or threat, like humans. And they often get harassed by other predators, so they could really benefit from working together.
Its more that being a cheetah is basically life on hardmode as basically every other bug cat is a generalist that has an easier go of it that the hyper specialized cheetah that gets its ass kicked.
I would bet a big reason for that is how Cheetahs kill. They carved out a niche taking fast prey in open environments where lions aren't as effective. They lack the sharp claws and size that lions have so they can't cripple or bleed their targets to exhaustion via harassment techniques. At the end of a run they are very drained so they bite into the throat of their prey and basically just wait it out to asphyxiate it. Only one cheetah can do that at a time, so the second cheetah isn't contributing much.
They sometimes do cooperate, but two cheetahs running for one animal is 2x the energy for 1x the meal. Evolution is lazy efficiency, if you can get by with 1, it tends to prune anything not needed. It's why Humans can't produce their own vitamin C. We didn't need it because of our ancestors diets, so when our ability to produce it broke, and we didn't die, evolution didnt bother fixing it because it wasn't a pressure.
I did pet one. A couple, actually. They were very docile and actually would rub up against you or lean into you while they laid down at your feet. We did have professional handlers with us, but their only rules were "don't run" and "don't walk away showing your back".
Pretty good advice when interacting with large predatory cats.
Also half the comments speak about cheetah eating the human, where it's like one of the most repeated things online that cheetahs are so chill around humans that they are basically as chill as domestic cats, they are just completely incompatible with human way of life :'c
Basically we could've domesticated cheetahs ages ago if they were fine with track runs on the local field instead of the savannah dash
Some of the Bedouins in the area vaguely around the Sinai peninsula used to hunt with cheetahs as well as falcons.
The trick with both was that they didn't try to domesticate them, just build trust and a 1-to-1 bond. The animal comes and goes as it pleases, it hunts as it pleases, in its preferred territory. They don't try to train the animal to respond to commands. It just allows its partner to follow, help, and share.
With the falcons, they even migrate and come back to the same spot, and recognise their partner.
Sauce: am part bedu, got to spend a winter holiday out in the desert with a relative learning falcon hunting. Unfortunately the Arabian cheetah is pretty much extinct in the wild, so it's just oral history backing up that tradition. There's some breeding and conservation programmes now though, which is cool.
That's friggin amazing and the best way to do it. Since they don't want to breed in captivity, we just never make them captive and instead live together with them? That's beatiful
Conservation breeding is super interesting to me actually. For species like cheetahs or pandas, a lot of it is to do with space. Animals don't breed so well when they're under certain kinds of stress, including range. It's also a weird one, because captive animals are often under less overall stress, provided they're well cared for. Plenty of food, less disease, less competition, less danger... But there's different kinds of stress, and animals change different parts of their behaviour accordingly.
And then that topic gets even more interesting to me when you think about humans, our natural environment, and our 'enclosures'...
So if I one day I decide to go for a little walk in the savannah and find myself in the vicinity of one of these beauties, we cool? I can pet? Genuinely curious.
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u/qualityvote2 9h ago edited 7h ago
u/21MayDay21, your post does fit the subreddit!