How dangerous are cheetahs?

Answer 1

It's not that easy to measure how dangerous animals are.

It becomes a mix of the ability to do damage and how likely the animal is to attack.

Cheetahs are solitary animals, meaning if one gets injured, there's no one that can hunt for them while they recover. They also hunt by speed, meaning they're quite slender compared to the other big cats.

This adds up to an animal that really doesn't like to fight anything that looks big enough to fight back, like a human.

But they still have teeth and claws big and sharp enough to tear through the hide of antelopes, and can easily do serious damage to a human, should the cheetah choose to try.

So, compared to leopards, tigers and lions - who occasionally do become man eaters, cheetahs are less dangerous.

But less dangerous doesn't mean "safe".

It's very unlikely that a cheetah would deliberately try to kill a human, which lions, tigers and leopards sometimes do. But a cheetah still can do a lot of damage only trying to get away, or to be left alone.

Humans are the cheetahs biggest threat. They may be very weak, but the world really couldn't live with out them. The gazelle population would grow so immense that if one got an illness, it would spread through out the entire population and on to other types of animals.

Answer 2

There has never been a documented case of a cheetah attacking a human so they pose little danger to humans.