How Fast Do Cheetahs REALLY Run? (It's Not 75 MPH)

Seventy-five miles an hour. It's in the textbooks, it's on the boards at zoos, and it's in almost every article ever written about this animal. No one has ever measured it. In 2013 a team from the Royal Veterinary College put tracking collars on five wild cheetahs in the Okavango Delta and recorded 367 real hunts. What came back changed the cheetah speed story completely — not just the top speed, but which measurement actually decides whether the fastest land animal catches anything at all. This is the full story behind the famous cheetah running clips, checked against the published science and the researchers who did the work. What you'll learn Where the 75 mph number actually came from — and why it has never been measured What five collars in Botswana recorded across 367 hunts in the wild Why the hunt is decided by feet, not speed Why the forty-year-old "cheetahs overheat" explanation turned out to be wrong The part of a cheetah that evolved more recently than our own species left Africa SUGGESTED CHAPTERS 0:00 The number you have heard your whole life 0:22 Five collars in Botswana 0:48 Where seventy-five came from 1:21 Craig Sharp, 1997: the only rigorous timing 1:43 Sarah at the Cincinnati Zoo 2:06 Nothing in the real world runs straight 2:29 Alan Wilson builds the collar 2:52 What a real hunt actually looks like 3:12 58 miles an hour, once 3:29 It hunts at a suburban speed limit 3:43 The engine: power to weight 4:05 120 watts per kilogram 4:18 It all goes into two seconds 4:48 So why do three hunts in four fail 5:01 The heat myth: Harvard, 1973 5:28 Robyn Hetem measures wild cheetahs 5:52 The temperature spike comes after 6:05 Stress, not running 6:48 What actually exhausts a cheetah 7:18 The real cost is walking 7:45 The robbed-cheetah story 8:02 How much theft would actually matter 8:20 Sorting 367 runs by outcome 9:01 It is braking, not accelerating 9:28 The number that separates them 9:55 Why it brakes at all 10:11 Harder than a polo horse 10:25 The claws are track spikes 10:44 How does it keep its eyes on anything 10:59 Grohe, 2018: the inner ear 11:33 The fossil cheetah did not have it 11:50 So how fast does a cheetah really run 12:28 The arithmetic it is actually doing 13:00 Seven thousand one hundred left If you like facts that survive a fact-check, subscribe to Brain Tenacity. One animal, one episode, and the studies named out loud. Sources: Wilson, Lowe, Roskilly, Hudson, Golabek & McNutt (2013), Royal Veterinary College / Botswana Predator Conservation Trust — Nature 498:185, "Locomotion dynamics of hunting in wild cheetahs" — https://www.nature.com/articles/natur... Sharp (1997), Journal of Zoology — "Timed running speed of a cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus)" Hetem et al. (2013), University of the Witwatersrand — Biology Letters 9:20130472, "Cheetah do not abandon hunts because they overheat" — https://royalsocietypublishing.org/do... Scantlebury, Mills, Wilson, Durant et al. (2014), Queen's University Belfast / Zoological Society of London — Science 346:79, "Flexible energetics of cheetah hunting strategies provide resistance against kleptoparasitism" — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s... Grohé, Lee & Flynn (2018), American Museum of Natural History — Scientific Reports 8:2301, "Recent inner ear specialization for high-speed hunting in cheetahs" — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159... Durant et al. (2017), Zoological Society of London / Panthera / Wildlife Conservation Society — PNAS 114:528, "The global decline of cheetah Acinonyx jubatus and what it means for conservation" — https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas... #cheetah #wildlife #WildlifeDocumentary #bigcats #savannah #africanwildlife #animalfacts #NatureDocumentary #MythBusting #biomechanics #Predator #impala #conservation #Botswana #bigcatsofafrica #NatureShorts #braintenacity ****************************************************************************** 📺 Subscribe for More Videos 👇    / @braintenacity   ****************************************************************************** Follow Us here 👇 📸 Instagram –   / braintenacity   🎵 TikTok –   / braintenacity   📘 Facebook –   / braintenacity   🐦 X (Twitter) – https://www.x.com/braintenacity/ ****************************************************************************** 🎥 Watch More from Our Playlists 👇 👉    / @braintenacity   ******************************************************************************