An Ancient Pet

What Most of Us Know:  The cheetah, currently on the endangered species list, achieves by far the fastest land speed of any living animal.  They have the ability to reach speeds between 112 and 120 km/h (70 and 75 mph) in short bursts covering distances up to 500 m (1,600 ft), with the ability to accelerate from 0 to over 100 km/h (62 mph) in three seconds.

What Most of us Don’t Know:   Ancient Egyptians often kept cheetahs as pets, and also tamed and trained them for hunting.  Cheetahs would be taken to hunting fields in low-sided carts or by horseback, hooded and blindfolded, and kept on leashes while dogs flushed out their prey.  When the prey was near enough, the cheetahs would be released and their blindfolds removed.

This tradition was passed on to the ancient Persians and brought to India, where the practice was continued by Indian princes into the twentieth century.

Cheetahs continued to be associated with royalty and elegance, their use as pets spreading just as their hunting skills were. Other such princes and kings kept them as pets, including Genghis Khan and Charlemagne, who boasted of having kept cheetahs within their palace grounds. Akbar the Great, ruler of the Mughal Empire from 1556 to 1605, kept as many as 1000 cheetahs.  As recently as the 1930s the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, was often photographed leading a cheetah by a leash.