A lot of the stuff you’ll see online right now is pretty depressing, possibly concerning how the world is falling apart or how we could randomly go to war at any second. But you know what isn’t depressing? This video of cheetah cubs doing their very best to let out some little roars.
Image: Smithsonian’s National Zoo
The cubs live at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, which recently experienced a “cheetah cub boom”, resulting in 10 new cheetah babies from two large litters.
“The average litter size is three, so this time we’ve got an incredible pile of cubs,” Adrienne Crosier, SCBI cheetah biologist and manager of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Cheetah Species Survival Plan, said in a press release.
Cheetahs are listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, which makes raising cheetahs under human care difficult. But it’s looking better!
“One of our big goals across the population right now is to breed more new individual animals, mixing and matching more pairs to diversify the genetics as much as possible,” Crosier said. “The birth of these two litters at SCBI is really symbolic of the recent success story playing out across the country as the result of coordinated efforts and terrific communication between cheetah breeding centres.”
While it is not possible to determine what noise these cubs were trying to make with absolutely certainty, it seems far more likely they were trying to chirp rather than roar, as adult cheetahs do.