… nope …. just sleeping … again!
If you think lions are lazy (and they most certainly are), then that’s before you have seen cheetahs. They are quasi always resting or sleeping, whenever we come across them.
In their defense, they can afford it. When they do hunt, they are ruthlessly effective. Average kill success rates go up to 80%, while a very good lion will reach 40% or so.
And that also explains these long rest periods. The kind of muscles that cheetahs have are quasi all “fast-twitch” fibers, and that gives them this explosive power, enabling them to reach speeds in excess of 100 km/h, making them officially the fastest animal on earth. That’s the current record. Maybe there was a faster animal at some point in the past, but if there was, it wasn’t recorded, and it’s extinct now in any case.
Back to muscles: Fast-twitch muscles need much longer recuperation periods than slow twitch muscle fibers, and so when they do fail to make a kill it often takes them a very long time period to recover and to regain their strength for the next attempt. But as I said above, this is only rarely the case, they tend to succeed much more often than they fail.
After a good meal, they tend to retreat to an area they feel safe in (these 2 brothers have their favourite spot in a dry river bed), and laze about for hours on end, digesting and getting ready for the next hunt. That about covers their life. Sweet.
Cheetahs are also VERY rare now. There are probably only about 400 specimen left in the wild in South Africa, but thanks to reserves such as ours, their numbers seem to be edging up again. We have at least two breeding females now, so the future seems to be safe for them on this spot, for now … if you want to see these extremely rare, and utmostly beautiful animals in the wild, there is no better reserve than this one that I can think of. That’s guaranteed. We see cheetahs here 3-4 times/week, and that’s a very, very high sighting occurrence.
