Status and taxonomy

The cheetah has lived in association with humans since at least 3000 bce, when the Sumerians depicted a leashed cheetah with a hood on its head on an official seal. During this period in Egypt, the cheetah was revered as a symbol of royalty in the form of the cat goddess Mafdet. Cheetahs were kept as pets by many famous historical figures, such as Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, and Akbar the Great of India (who had more than 9,000 in his stable). These cats were also used for sport. Trained and tame, they were typically hooded and carried on horseback or in a cart, then dehooded and released near their quarry. In spite of the large numbers of cheetahs kept in captivity by royalty during the 14th–16th centuries, almost all were captured from the wild because there was essentially no captive breeding. Because of this continuous drain on wild Asiatic populations, cheetahs from Africa were being imported into India and Iran during the early 1900s.

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In 1900 an estimated 100,000 cheetahs were found in habitats throughout continental Africa and from the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula to India. Today cheetahs have been extirpated from a large portion of this area. In Asia they are nearly extinct, with the largest confirmed population (a few dozen) inhabiting northeastern Iran. In Africa there are an estimated 9,000 to 12,000 cheetahs, with the largest populations existing in Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe in Southern Africa and Kenya and Tanzania in East Africa. Smaller, more isolated populations exist in other countries, including South Africa, Congo (Kinshasa), Zambia, Somalia, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, Cameroon, Chad, and the Central African Republic. All populations are threatened, even within protected areas, because of increased competition from large predators such as lions and hyenas. Outside of reserves, humans pose a threat in several forms, including habitat loss, poaching, and indiscriminate trapping and shooting to protect livestock.

The cheetah was common throughout North America, Europe, and Asia until the end of the last ice age, about 11,700 years ago—a time coincident to when large numbers of mammals disappeared throughout the Northern Hemisphere. All North American and European cheetahs and most of those in Asia vanished. About this time the cheetah populations seem to have experienced what may have been the first and most severe of a series of size reductions (demographic bottlenecks). Modern cheetahs retain evidence of this historic event in their DNA. There is a very high level of genetic similarity in all but the most rapidly evolving parts of the cheetah’s genome, which makes all of today’s individuals appear highly inbred. This condition has been linked with increased susceptibility to infectious diseases (such as feline infectious peritonitis, or FIP), increased infant mortality, and high levels of abnormal sperm. No evidence, however, links low levels of genetic variation with reduced fitness in wild populations.

Early taxonomists interpreted the numerous specialized traits of cheetahs as evidence that they diverged from the other cat species early in the evolutionary history of the cat family (Felidae). The cheetah was therefore granted unique taxonomic status, and since the early 1900s it has been classified as the only species of genus Acinonyx. Cheetahs are often divided into five subspecies: A. jubatus jubatus in Southern Africa, A. jubatus fearsoni (including A. jubatus velox and A. jubatus raineyi) from eastern Africa, A. jubatus soemmeringii from Nigeria to Somalia, A. jubatus hecki from northwestern Africa, and A. jubatus venaticus from Arabia to central India. The king cheetah, once thought to be a distinct subspecies, is a Southern African form that has a “blotchy” coat pattern presumably from a rare recessive genetic mutation.

Numerous molecular genetic studies suggest that the cheetah shares a common ancestor with the puma and jaguarundi, from which it diverged six to eight million years ago, probably in North America. Fossils attributable to cheetahlike species dating from two to three million years ago have been found in North America in what is now Texas, Nevada, and Wyoming.