Holy cats. Now I totally want to pet a cheetah.
And I really, really doubt there’s many Africans that keep cheetahs as housecats. They’re large, powerful animals, and well equipped to easily take out a human. I’d bet the frequency of Africans keeping cheetahs as housecats is about the same as the frequency of Americans keeping cheetahs as housecats - that is to say, small enough to be almost zero.
Apparantly they meow too.
Be sure to get one of those fancified “King Cheetahs” ;).
I suspect you’re correct. They simply aren’t common enough these days to be…well…common pets.
But they are remarkably easy to tame relative to other wild cats and when they were common, local nobility all over Africa and Asia kept them to course game. Another appropos wiki-photo. If they weren’t so extraordinarily difficult to breed in captivity I suspect they would have been fully domesticated thousands of years ago and you could have gotten your wish. We’d probably have rescue programs the same as exist for ex-racing greyhounds today that would be begging for folks to adopt them.
I’ve long been a supporter of the Cheetah Conservation Fund. Dr. Marker and her team are doing fantastic work to save these beautiful animals in the wild.
