Cheetahs Are Fastest
How
fast can animals run? And which is fastest? There are lots
of records but also lots of arguments, mainly because there
are many problems in measuring the speed of a wild animal.
To time humans, we use carefully measured tracks, runners started by the sound of a gun, and stopwatches. We can be almost as careful in timing horse races, since the horses are trained and have riders. But that won’t work for wild animals.
Of course there are some ways to compare speeds of different animals. A predator like a cheetah can make a living by running fast to catch up to its prey. And its prey includes fast-running animals like gazelles and antelopes. That’s where we got the idea that the cheetah may be the fastest running animal. But how can we measure its speed for the record books?
For some animals, speed has been measured by following the animal in a car while watching the speedometer. Others have been timed by filming the animal as it runs, then using the movie to time how long an animal takes to move its own length. Then it takes a measurement of the animal’s length and a little math to figure out its speed. Both of those methods leave some room for argument.
Accurate
Measurement
For the cheetah, we now have a measurement of speed done
so carefully that it became a scientific experiment. It
was done by a British track coach who was visiting in Kenya.
The
cheetah in this experiment, Pritchelou, was an orphan that
had been brought up on a farm and then returned to the wild.
She often came back to the farm, and it was on one of her
visits that the measurements were made.
The coach, Mr. N.C.C. Sharp, carefully recorded his experiment. First he measured off a course of 220 yards using a surveyor’s tape. That’s almost exactly the same length as the 200-meter dash, a distance that sprinters run throughout the world.
The track was on level ground and marked by two posts at each end. At the starting end, Mr. Sharp tied a piece of white wool yarn between the posts. At the finish he marked a line on the ground between the two posts. To make sure his stopwatch was correct, he checked it against two stopwatches of the Kenya Athletic Association. Then he picked a quiet, windless day for the experiment.
To get ready for each test, the cheetah was held 18 yards behind the starting line. A truck, with its engine running and ready to go, was 75 yards down the course.
The coach stood in the back of the truck. In one hand he held the stopwatch, in the other a piece of meat that had been shown to the cheetah. He shouted for the cheetah to be released, and started the stopwatch when she broke the yarn at the starting point.
A driver revved up the truck to stay ahead of the cheetah until well beyond the finish line. The coach stopped the watch when he saw the chest of the cheetah cross the finish line. Then he threw down the meat to let the cheetah eat it.
Two more trials were made, with a thirty-minute rest between them. The times for the three trials were 7.0, 6.9, and 7.2 seconds.
The
Cheetah’s Time
Mr. Sharp chose the average of 7.0 seconds as the time it
took the cheetah to run 220 yards. If you want to do the
math, you can figure that the average speed was 31 yards
per second, or 29 meters per second, or 65 miles per hour.
For comparison, a racehorse can run about 41 miles per hour, and champion human sprinters run only about 23 miles per hour.
The design of Mr. Sharp’s experiment meant that the cheetah purposely was given a running start. That gives the cheetah a little advantage over other animals, such as racehorses, which are timed from a standing start. But the cheetah is so much faster that it leaves no doubt that it is the world's fastest running animal.
Of course, like most scientific experiments, this one was not perfect. It did not answer all the questions you might like to ask. A cheetah now holds the record as the world's fastest animal. But we do not know that the cheetah used in the experiment is the world's fastest cheetah.
