I have embedded this video before, but I have not provided a good analysis of it.
These cheetahs were captured as adults and then socialized to people– something that is almost impossible to do with feral cats!
And then they are trained to attack the adult male blackbuck, which is the exact opposite of which animals a cheetah would target in the wild. Cheetahs are fast, but unlike leopards and pantherine cats, they don’t have as much brute strength that can be used to pull a large animal down. Instead, cheetahs often try to use one of the forepaws to trip the prey when they advance close enough to it. If the animal is tripped, the cheetah has a chance of running fast enough to get to its neck before it has chance to get up.
When you see these cheetahs grab adult male blackbuck, it is going against what it normally would do, for it is obvious that a cheetah has a very hard time bringing down such powerful prey. Their canine teeth aren’t as large as those of other cats, so it takes them several minutes to kill their prey. If the prey is big and healthy, it could easily injure the cheetah as it is making its killing bite.
The cheetahs have to have a certain amount of trust that their handlers will advance upon the downed blackbuck and kill it. Otherwise, it would be very likely that the downed blackbuck could injure the cheetah in its death throes.
The cheetahs are rewarded with food. They are given a ladle of blood if they are needed for more coursing, but if their day is over, they are given a portion of the kill. One does not see any compulsory training or harsh handling of the cheetahs in this film. The animals appear to be bonded to their handlers, and they are working cooperatively.
And this does have some basis in the natural world.
Male cheetahs often band together to take larger prey than they would be able to kill as individuals. The females hunt on their own, which sounds pretty weird. A female cheetah with young would have a greater need for lots of fresh meat that could more easily be procured through cooperative hunting, but they simply don’t do it.
So cheetahs do have some amount of cooperative hunting as part of their natural repertoire of behaviors, which is why they could be used as coursing animals.
But then question becomes “Why weren’t cheetahs domesticated?”
They have all the traits that would make a good domestic animal. They are readily tamed and made docile– so docile that they allow hunters to put hoods over their heads while they are holding their prey in their jaws.
But no cheetah courser ever bred enough cheetahs in captivity to maintain a population large enough for any kind of selective breeding. Cheetahs are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity, and modern zoos were not able to produce a live cheetah birth until 1960. People have been trying to breed coursing cheetahs since time of the Ancient Assyrians and Egyptians, and although they might have produced a cub here and there- they were largely unsuccessful in their endeavors.
The Indian nobles were never able to breed cheetahs, even when they devoted great resources to the project. One noble kept a thousand cheetahs, and he tried virtually every technique he could imagine to produce cubs. He failed miserably.
This inability to reproduce has traditionally been blamed upon the fact that cheetahs are quite inbred. It is estimated that their worldwide population was reduced to 7 individuals 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, which is bad enough, and in the past 150 years, cheetahs have experienced a massive population collapse. Their entire Asian range has been reduced to some isolated pockets in Iran, and their range in Africa has been greatly fragmented. So they were already quite inbred from natural causes, and it has been made worse through hunting and habitat destruction.
Male cheetahs do have low sperm counts. More than 75 percent of male cheetah sperm is malformed, but this doesn’t stop cheetahs in the wild from reproducing. It turns out that the reason why cheetahs have such a hard time reproducing is that they have an elaborate courtship ritual. Male cheetahs, which band together as previously mentioned, chase the female when she is estrus. They chase her for several days, and this activity stimulates her into ovulation. In captivity, male cheetahs were never really given this opportunity, and most would-be cheetah domesticators wouldn’t have the space or the understanding to get this mating ritual correct.
And if one has to allow cheetahs their courtship chase, it soon becomes obvious.
If you can breed coursing dogs in the basement, why would you ever breed cheetahs?
The coursing dog might not be as fast as the cheetah, but it’s pretty darn close to the cheetah in its conformation and utility. And it is very easy to breed. It requires almost no knowledge to get them to breed. Just make sure you have a male and a female.
And if they are easy to breed, then you can produce lots of offspring from which one can selectively breed.
Cheetahs don’t have that utility.
As much as I enjoy watching this cheetah coursing clip and thinking of what might have happened had we had some better understanding of cheetah reproduction, I know that the cheetah simply was not going to become a domestic animal. I don’t know how this species would have withstood all the intense selection that is necessary for domestication. Although these animals are readily tamed, there would always be a desire to breed a cheetah that was even tamer, and with an animal with such finite genetic diversity, it is unlikely that captive strains would have been viable in the long term.
It’s just one of those animals that appears to have been the ideal hunting partner, but its natural history precluded it from ever reaching this status.
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I am unfamiliar with the dietary strictures for Muslims regarding the animals that cheetahs catch, but I have come across the strictures for those that a dog catches. Are these rules the same for cheetahs?
I’m just curious, for it might explain why cheetahs were preferred over dogs in some cultures.
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This video says “India,” but at the time, India was a British possession that included the country we call India today and the countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh. This footage could have easily been taken in what is now Pakistan, and considering the religion of the hunters, it probably was.
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Oh. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say it:
Cheetahs are returning to India!
They aren’t going to be used to course blackbuck.
They might be coursing blackbuck, but they will be doing it on their own as native Indian wildlife.
I do find the concept of a coursing cheetah quite interesting. I wonder how many cultures engaged in the practice? I have heard that some people think the “king cheetah” coat pattern is a by-product of domestication, or at least attempts at it. Of course, I can’t find a source for it, but it would be interesting if it were indeed true.
How could they be selectively bred when they lack genetic variation?
There is some genetic variation them. For example there is a color phase that Steph mentioned above, called the King Cheetah, and there was a wooly cheetah.
10,000 to 12,000 years can produce quite a bit of variance through mutation alone, but they are pretty genetically depauperate.
All Syrian hamsters in captivity that are available on the pet market also descend from about 7 individuals, all deriving from a single female and her offspring, but look at the variety in phenotype and temperament with those animals.
Cheetah have been selectively bred by nature. After their bottleneck, they were subject to balancing selection, which includes the evolution of their genetics (like the immune system) to match challenges by the environment, and mate selection, which allowed them choose mates with complementary genes in order to produce offspring that would be better able to cope with challenges. This produced an animal that has low genetic variation, but is well adapted to it’s environment, and thus survives despite it’s poor genetic diversity. There are many cases like this in the literature.
Selective breeding by humans is nothing like balancing selection. The selection criteria are entirely different, in most cases. Instead of removing animals from the gene pool for poor immune systems, the way nature does, humans select for things like tractability.
Well that was what I was thinking of. Whereas in the hamster situation mentioned, humans have been deliberately selecting for more genetic diversity because we tend to like unique things (and the hamsters don’t have to be able to survive in a natural environment, just to catch the eye of a human); natural selection on cheetahs has pared genetic variation down to a minimal level. It wouldn’t leave a human selection process much to work with.
Selecting for uniqueness, in the case of mutations like interesting colors or hairlessness, actually reduces genetic diversity, because you are invariably starting with a single unique animal, and then must use that animals genes over and over again to get more animals which show the trait.
Natural selection actually doesn’t remove genetic variation. Balancing selection preserves the variation that is there. Let’s take the San Nicolas Island fox as an example. In the 70s, these foxes experienced a bottleneck, their population was reduced to around 5-10 individuals. They had no choice except to inbreed, being a small population on an island. Because of that, these foxes have the least amount of genetic variation of any species studied so far, using the neutral markers typically measured for such things.
However, if we look at the genes which make up the immune system, the major histocompatibility complex or MHC, we do see some diversity. This is because these foxes have been practicing inbreeding avoidance by utilizing mate selection, to choose the foxes which have different MHC genes than themselves as mates. This is a population that is has no genetic diversity at all, except at the MHC.
There is another study on a type of sheep, descended from only two individuals on an island, that shows how animals preserve diversity in the MHC by mate selection.
This is also tied into coevolution, where the animals with the MHC genes that protect them from pathogens in the environment are the ones that are successful and reproduce. If the pathogens change, then the animals with MHC genes that respond to those particular pathogens are successful, thus changing the genetic profile of the population in response to changes in the environment.
Nature generally does not like homozygosity in the immune system. The animal that is heterozygous will have many tools in it’s immune system to deal with pathogens; the homozygous animal has only a few, thus, the heterozygous animal will be more successful.
Selective breeding by humans does not take these things into account. Humans protect the animals from disease, choose their mates for them, and their criteria for breeding is often based on appearance rather than general hardiness. This results in animals that are VERY homozygous, not only for the genes that control appearance or function, but for the MHC as well.
To tie this in to Cheetah, they already have very little genetic variation. They survive because of their ability to adapt, in a limited way, to their environment. If we remove the things that have allowed them to maintain what variation they do have (coevolution, mate selection) then we will risk making them entirely homozygous in the MHC, thus reducing the remaining fitness that they do have. Each animal will respond to inbreeding depression in different ways; Cheetah already have problems with reproduction, and they would likely become unable to reproduce entirely if we were breeding them much like we do with dogs.
Obviously if people are choosing just one trait, or one line to breed from, it will reduce genetic diversity. But in the case of the hamsters (for instance) that hasn’t happened. Any variation has been encouraged. And particularly starting with a small sample and producing for the pet market, I doubt there was much if any culling. Any viable offspring would likely get a chance to reproduce until there was a fairly large population. That is going to ENCOURAGE genetic diversity.
In the case of the cheetahs, they have adapted as a specialized species. Too much variation means an individual that can’t function in that role, so genetic diversity is DISCOURAGED.
At least, that is what I have to presume, since we are told by scientists who have studied it that cheetahs all have almost identical DNA. I’ve seen them described as “identical twins”, and I’ve seen concerns mentioned that a new disease could wipe the whole species out due to this lack of genetic diversity.
Thus my suggestion that even if humans could get cheetahs to reproduce readily, they would have a hard time doing any selective breeding, since there is so little material to work with there. Taking my most recent breeding of my dog as an example, I wanted more leg on my bitch. So I picked a stud dog who had more leg, and was descended from a dog known to add leg to his descendents. (a bit of an oversimplification of the selection process, but good enough for this). Easy. Anyone can do that sort of thing. But if all possible mate selections had the same length of leg, how could I select to change it?
And if you are correct that further inbreeding of cheetahs would make them unable to reproduce at all, then that would make it even less possible for them to be selectively bred. So again, I don’t see how it could be done.
It actually never could be done.
When they say cheetahs are close to identical twins, they are correct.
However, they have been inbreeding for 10,000 to 12,000 years, and nature has culled very strongly against any weakness in the population.
But during those years, mutations have still happened, and you do get some genetic variation that way. That’s why we get king cheetahs, but you’d never be able to create a strain of purebred king cheetahs without creating a totally sterile line at some point.
Cheetahs are not better off because they are inbred. They are able to exist as they do in spite of being quite inbred, not because of it. Lions have much more genetic variation as do wolves, but they are fit for their niches, just as cheetahs are. And neither of those species has trouble breeding, and neither of those species would ever become extinct because some freak disease hit the population. Tasmanian devils, for example, are going extinct because they have several clearly defined and quite severe genetic bottlenecks in their evolutionary history, and their lack of diversity in the MHC prevents them from having any resistance to the facial tumor disease.
I didn’t intend to imply that being inbred was better for the cheetahs. Just that evolutionary pressures, in combination with the genetic bottleneck, has suppressed natural genetic variation. Or at least, so it would appear. I kind of thought the whole “one disease could wipe out the whole species” thing argues AGAINST the inbreeding being the best thing for them. It’s simply a thing that is.
And that would make it a species not malleable to human breeding efforts, because there is simply nothing there to select for. Unless one wanted to select for the king cheetah pattern which as you said, would not be viable.
There has to be genetic variation in a domesticated species for human breeding efforts to make any headway.
Humans have only really selected for diversity in dogs as a whole, certainly NOT within individual breeds. Dogs as a species are very diverse, individual breeds are the exact opposite.
If anyone was serious about “remixing” a dog from various breeds there are a lot of genes to work with. But really, who is doing that and are they getting support? Almost all crossbreeding efforts are vilified by the pure blood brigade.
With the cheetah, there is some variation even in the wild population, and if people tried to keep them as domesticated species, we would try to selectively breed from that very truncated variation and we would very quickly find out that we can’t go very far line-breeding cheetahs.
Let’s say that someone wants to breed a strain of cheetahs that has only the king cheetah phase in it. There are breeding programs in Namibia that produce them– along with the other kind.
If we decided to create a breed of cheetahs like that, it would all fall apart. There isn’t enough variation in the other genes, and we’d also have to inbreed to keep trait fixed in the population.
[…] In India, where cheetahs are currently extinct, they were regularly used to bring down blackbuck. […]
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