Captive Cheetahs: A Puzzling Failure to Breed

As cheetah populations have dwindled in the wild, biologists have felt mounting pressure to try to breed cheetahs in captivity. Their task has seemed monumental. Indeed, Akbar the Great unwittingly set a record that was to last 400 years when one of his cheetahs gave birth to a litter of three cubs in the 1500's. Even with thousands of the cats to work with, Akbar's cheetah keepers never recorded producing a second litter. And no other captive births are on record until 1956, when a female in the Philadelphia Zoo also produced a litter of three, all of which died in infancy. A handful of other cheetah births were reported during the 1960's at zoos in Europe and the United States, but not until the early 1970's did a captive-born cub survive to maturity and give birth to a second generation of captive-born cubs. Zoos still had to purchase wild—caught animals to restock their exhibits.

During the 1970's, zoos began to realize the urgency of establishing a self-sustaining population of captive cheetahs, both to avoid taking any more animals from the wild and to build up a pool of cheetahs that might one day be used to restock Africa's remaining savannas. The zoos redoubled their efforts, and the number of captive births rose steadily. Most of these births, however, were at only a few institutions, including the San Diego Wild Animal Park, the Columbus Zoo in Ohio, and Wildlife Safari in Winston, Ore. By the end of the decade, researchers at other zoos began to wonder whether their efforts were being foiled by biological problems in the cheetahs themselves.