Seventy miles per hour is faster than the speed limit on the highway in Ohio. That’s how fast a cheetah can run at top speed. At this pace, a cheetah could run the length of a football field in about 3 seconds. How does it do it? It has perfect adaptations for speed. It has a long, slender body and legs, light bones, and claws that do not retract all the way to help with traction, just like an athlete’s cleats do. Its paws are less round and harder than other cats, and its long tail helps to balance its body. Both of these adaptations help it to make quick turns.

Because of their speed, cheetahs were captured and used as hunting companions as long ago as 3000 B.C. They were used by early Egyptians as a symbol of royalty and Egyptian pharaohs often kept tame cheetahs as pets. Cheetahs continued to be used for hunting by royalty in Europe and China during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. The cheetahs were captured as adults so they had already learned how to hunt well on their own. Cheetahs are not very aggressive and could be fairly easily trained. When taken out to hunt, the cheetahs wore a hood. The trainer did not remove the hood until the cheetah was taken near the prey. Once the cheetah had caught the prey, the trainer would give the cheetah a piece of its meat as a reward. One Indian ruler in the 16th century owned as many as 9,000 cheetahs during his reign.

Because so many cheetahs were taken from the wild in Asia to use for hunting, the numbers began to decline. In the early 1900s, people in India and Iran began to import cheetahs from Africa to be used for hunting. For this reason, as well as more recent threats such as loss of habitat, competition with larger predators and humans and susceptibility to disease, cheetahs have become endangered.