All this pop culture presence might create the impression that cheetahs are as secure in nature as they are in the popular imagination. They are not. In fact, cheetahs are the most vulnerable of the world’s big cats, surprisingly rare and growing steadily rarer. A few centuries ago cheetahs roamed from the Indian subcontinent to the shores of the Red Sea and throughout much of Africa. As fleet of foot as they are, though, they couldn’t outrun the long reach of humanity. Today the Asiatic cheetah, the elegant subspecies that once graced the royal courts of India, Persia, and Arabia, is all but extinct. In Africa cheetah numbers plummeted by more than 90 percent during the course of the 20th century, as farmers, ranchers, and herdsmen crowded the cats out of their habitat, hunters shot them for sport, and poachers captured cubs for the lucrative trade in exotic pets. In all, fewer than 10,000 cheetahs survive in the wild today.
Even within Africa’s great game parks, cheetahs are under heavy pressure. Shy and delicately built, the only big cats that cannot roar, they are bullied into the margins by lions, which are far stronger both in body and number. Consider Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park and the adjoining Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. Taken together the two parks are home to more than 3,000 lions, an estimated 1,000 leopards, and a mere 300 cheetahs. And despite their celebrity status, cheetahs lose out to lions in the tourism stakes as well. “Cheetahs tend to be something people look for on their second safari,” says guide Eliyahu Eliyahu. “The first time around is all about seeing lions. The trouble is, where you have a big lion population, you will never have many cheetahs.”