Cheetahs Are Dangerously Close to Extinction
Just 7,100 of the big cats remain in the wild, spurring conservationists to call for the species to be declared endangered.
The world’s fastest land mammal is racing toward extinction, with the latest cheetah census suggesting that the big cats, which are already few in number, may decline by an additional 53 percent over the next 15 years.
“That’s really perilous,” says Luke Hunter, president and CCO for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization. “That’s a very active decline, and you have to really step in and act to address that.”
Today there are just 7,100 cheetahs left in the wild, according to the new study, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s down from an estimated 14,000 cheetahs in 1975, when researchers made the last comprehensive count of the animals across
