Cheetahs in captivity have unusually high stress sensitivity and fail to breed successfully in most zoo environments, indicating fundamental welfare inadequacies that make captive cheetah management particularly challenging.
The extremely poor reproductive success of captive cheetahs is itself a welfare indicator — animals under chronic stress do not invest in reproduction. Gastric disease from stress is a direct welfare harm that causes pain before death. The cheetah sensitivity to routine disruption means that events normal in zoo management — visitor crowds, keeper changes, transfers — cause acute stress responses that accumulate into chronic welfare problems.