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One more time, that's AmericanPublicMedia.org slash action. Thanks so much for standing up for public media. Moment of Home comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Weigel. Why am I running? Mark Sanchez is normally the one that likes to go on runs. I guess it's good for me. Whatever. Whoa! Did you see that? That girl is really fast. How did you get to be that fast?
She's like, she's like a gazelle. No, a greyhound. No, a cheetah. I think that's a really fast animal, right, a cheetah? I wonder how they got to be that fast anyway. Hi, I'm here. I live in Sacramento. Why are cheetahs so fast? My name is Rick Schwartz. I'm the ambassador for San Diego Zoo Global that oversees the San Diego Zoo, the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and our conservation that we have around the world.
When it comes to the anatomy of a cheetah, everything about them is really built for speed. We can talk about the physiology or the structure of the spine, the legs and the muscles that propel the cat forward so quickly. The spine is incredibly flexible.
we kind of tell people to think of it as a giant spring and every time you bend a spring no matter what direction it wants to bounce back and with that physical force what the cheetah's body does as the back legs go forward and the front legs push back the spine curves And then it springs back and actually arches the other way allowing them to have a huge stride. We look at the cat family and cats are well known for having retractable claws.
Cheetahs are the exception to the rule. They have claws that are always out similar to a dog. So they are thick and they are blunt. But because they're always out they also work very much like you have for football cleats or soccer cleats. So as they're chasing and running, it does help them to get that grip while they change directions to chase down their prey.
There's the internal part of it as well. Enlarged lungs. It's pretty impressive the way that ribcage moves with the sprint to help force air in and out of those lungs, almost like bellows, if you would. If you compare, let's say, the cheetah's speed, top speed, you know, they don't always hit 70 miles an hour, but it's very close, usually most chases. If you compare that top speed to, say, something like a lion, another African cat that they will share territory with, the lion's top speed,
top speed usually around 35 they try to rely on that element of surprise and not the element of chase and the reason we see that the cheetah has to have this kind of speed versus the other cats can kind of use that element of surprise is when they hunt Cheetahs are going to hunt in the middle of the day when the other predators are sleeping. And the other predators, like lions and leopards, tend to hunt in the twilight and nighttime hours.
Wow, so we've learned that cheetahs are capable of big speeds, but something they don't have is a big voice. You've probably heard a lion and a tiger roar, right? Well, the cheetah is a kind of cat that can't roar. They have a voice box that's more similar to a small cat. So the sounds you'll hear them making are closer to purring, growling, chirping, or hissing. In fact, the chirping is really, really cute. It kind of sounds like a bird. So cute. Buttfishing.
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