The Cheetah's Best Friend

Yesterday I read in our paper that cheetahs are becoming rare in the wild. Maybe 12,000 left.  Zoos and related cheetah breeding programs have found it hard to get the animals to mate. Apparently cheetahs are skittish, nervous, not quick to befriend one another. They have trouble relaxing and making love. This surprised  me--I remember reading about the domestication of cheetahs. African kings used them the way we use hunting dogs. I assumed that cheetahs were calm animals.

Fortunately some smart fellow has come up with an answer. You don't put a bunch of cheetahs together to reassure them. They don't like one another. Instead you assign to each cheetah a large loyal companion dog. This gives the cheetah a friend to comfort it. And if something bad comes along, the dog will roar and fight. Of course the relationship is somewhat one-sided. While the dog is loyally defending it, the cheetah will depart at speeds unknown to other land mammals. The cheetah is a cat.

A cheetah with a companion dog is a cheetah at ease, ready to date. At meal times, though, the two have to be separated. Otherwise the dog will eat two meals.