The first animal in Africa that I was exposed to, and for most other people, was the cheetah. Now they are heading towards extinction. Imagine future generations not being able to know what a cheetah is and what they’re importance to Africa was. The cheetahs’ population has decreased from around 100,000 in the 1900's to nearly 7,000 in the wild today. With cheetahs being at the brink of extinction, it will cause the sustainability of our ecosystem to be at risk.

Cheetahs are mainly endangered due to human impacts. Cheetahs are dying because of farmers and hunters. Farmers kill these animals because they believe the cheetahs will kill their livestock, while hunters kill them for “sport.” Furthermore, climate change (which is caused by us) is also causing cheetahs to negatively affect their breeding. Climate change can cause gazelles to die due to the sun become too intense. This forces cheetahs to change their diet, which can cause a variety of defects in their sperm. This then causes malformations to appear in the cheetah’s offspring, further leading the cheetahs to extinction.

Cheetahs becoming extinct may also lead to an endangerment of humanity’s ecosystem. With cheetahs being extinct it’ll cause its prey’s population to increase since there’s nothing to check their population. This causes an overpopulation which leads to the herbs and plants in that environment to be fully eaten. This would cause the herbivores to leave into other ecosystems, including ours, while destroying everything in its path. Additionally, this damages the soil making it so that it is infertile and cannot be used for farming, which hurts the world’s economy.