Cheetahs

by Karl Duvall

A cheetah is best known for its speed. They are small compared to lions and tigers, but is best in speed, which we will talk about later. A cheetah's body shape is slender, with its small round head, deep chest, long legs, it is adapted for speed. A cheetah's color can be tawny to light grey. The head is covered with spots, except on the nose, mouth, eyes and inside of ears. There is a "beauty mark", a line that goes from the eyes to the corner of the mouth. No one knows what this is for. It may be to cut off the glare of the glare of the sun like a baseball-player's mark. Underparts are white, and mostly top is spotted with black. The tail goes from spots to stripes somewhere around the middle, and a tuft of complete white. The length of a cheetah's head and body is just over 4 feet, while the tail is 2 feet. Cheetahs stand just over 3 feet (ft.) and weigh over 100 pounds (lb)! A cheetah has, I think, 4 or 5 claws. On each front leg there is a dew claw, a claw that is below the knee, used to knock down their prey. This claw, I believe, can not be pulled in, or retracted. Even the other blunt claws can be only partly retracted. A cheetah's claws, front and back, (no, not the dew claw) are built for digging into the earth.

There is a ('so-called') king cheetah. It has stripes replacing some of the spots in some places. It was discovered in 1927, in Rhodesia (wherever that is!). I think it is just a few cheetahs that have some mixed-up information.

History

Well, let me tell you something: CHEETAHS ARE ENDANGERED!

You may be wondering how this happened. Well, I'll tell you:

Once people killed so many cheetahs, there were only a few of them left. But the cheetah hang on, and made a come-back! But everyone was related to everyone else. And that made them vulnerable to diseases. But now they're doing okay, only the relative-weakness thing dangers them, with humans.

Mating

A female cheetah will chase a male if she accepts his invitation to a mating chase.They will chase each other in and out of the bushes for two days.The chase will end when the female moves over on her belly and allow the male to mount her. Then the female lives alone again for three months. She has to hunt for food every day for her developing cubs and herself. When she is ready for birth, she looks for a thick thorn bush where she can hide her cubs. Later, there can be 2-5 small blind cubs squirming around close to their mother. She will then clean them with her long pink tongue. There is a covering of long hair across their shoulders and backs, which protects them from the rain and hot sun. This will eventually wear off during the third month. The mother will let them nurse. They will nurse and sleep, then wake up to nurse. When the young don't feel their mother, they will make a chirping sound. Their mother cheetah will chirp back. She has no roar like the lion.

The mother will move the cubs to another hiding place when she hears, smells or sees a lion or a hyena. Sometimes, though, despite all this, she may lose a few cubs.

One day the mother will take the cubs into the sunshine.