African Cheetah
The Past, Present, And Future Of The African Cheetah
The African cheetah is genetically identical to his Asian and former Indian counterparts, and there is absolutely no doubt as to this fact. Even the king cheetah is made of all the same stuff, with only a slight mutation to account for his coloration differences. The African cheetah was all but extinct in the early 1950’s, as the trophy poaching of non-sportsmen came to a halt with their apparent disappearance. They have since recovered in numbers, so well as to be removed from the endangered list and on to the threatened list. With total population numbers estimated at around 10,000, the African cheetah has done quite well for himself despite many natural and imposed obstacles.
Cheetahs have very fickle fertilization statistics, and it is estimated that only one in ten mating attempts is actually successful. The female African cheetah is quite a loner, and tends to be aggressively antisocial with any company aside from that of her offspring. If she has been successfully mated, her cubs have a one in five chance of being born healthy and surviving through their first three months of life on the harsh savannah. As caring and protective a mother as any in the animal kingdom, the frequent loss of her babies causes her grief. This scant and scattered birthing ritual, brought on by the inherent sperm weakness of the male of the species, makes the cheetahs recovery in numbers even more impressive.
The male members of the African cheetah family are much more dependent upon one another for socialization, protection, and comfort. These boys don’t appreciate alone time, and can often be found lounging together in tangled piles of three or four. Un like the rogue young lion males who only cavort together until they have found a pride to head, the cheetah males are rarely prone to outward aggression with one another. The African cheetah does have some issues with the larger prides of more powerful big cats, and are often forced away from their hard earned watering and hunting grounds. These big cats are the least stout, averaging 70 to 120 pounds during adulthood. Pairing four of these pussy cats against ten to twenty lions who weigh in at around 350 pounds each is not a pretty sight. The fast cheetah more often high tails it out of there rather than to risk life threatening injury.
The Asian cheetah and the African cheetah, as mentioned early on, are genetically identical, and are called by the region of their development merely to decipher between habitat and situation. He has come leaps and bounds, literally, over the past forty-five years, and with the continued help and support of wildlife conservationists will prosper long into the future.