Article is from 2019 but Atlas Obscura featured it in their newsletter today,
An Emotional Support Dog Is the Only Thing That Chills Out a Cheetah
Like humans, the notoriously nervous cats can use a surrogate best friend.
by Isaac Schultz August 19, 2019
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/c ... friendship
Quote:
... But the practice of rearing young cheetahs with a canine companion has become a major means of relaxing the notoriously nervous cats at U.S. zoos from New York to San Diego.
The relationship didn’t begin there, however. Nor, for that matter, did it start on an African wildlife reserve. Captive cheetahs and dogs first became friends in a small town in Oregon.
In 1976, research scientist and conservation biologist Laurie Marker was living in Winston, a town of about 3,000 people. As the curator of a cheetah-breeding program at Wildlife Safari, she found herself hand-rearing a lonely cheetah cub named Khayam.
Cheetahs are companionable litter-mates, but Marker had no other cats to put with Khayam. So she decided to try pairing the fastest land mammal on the planet with the animal typically thought of as a human’s best friend.
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