What Eats Cheetahs?
Occasionally, cheetahs are attacked by larger predators such as lions, hyenas and leopards. For adult cheetahs, this is a rare occurrence, but for cheetah cubs, the mortality rate reaches around 90 percent.
Fierce competition between more muscular predators creates disadvantages the cheetah; this is due to the fact that the cheetah’s body style is built for speed, not for fighting with the larger, more muscular predators of the African plains. The land development of the natural habitat for large predators is rapidly increasing, resulting in the displacement of big cats into unlikely habitats. Cheetahs have difficulty finding food in these new, unknown areas. This difficulty drives them onto human-occupied lands, where they are often killed for eating livestock.
