Meet the Zoo's cats
Watch the cheetah cam
Adopt a cheetah, meerkat, or another African animal.
The National Zoo Store Online offers an array of books, educational games, and more related to the African Savanna.
Visit
the Smithsonian's African Art Museum.
Meet the Zoo's Cheetahs
Currently, one female cheetah lives at the National Zoo's Cheetah Conservation Station.
In November 2009, three male cheetah brothers were transferred to the Cheetah Science Facility at the Zoo's Virginia campus, also home to females Amani and Zazi. The facility houses cheetahs in spacious, outdoor enclosures, with indoor spaces for inclement weather. It includes an animal-care building to house animal keepers and researchers and allow them to observe, manage, and care for the animals. 
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The Zoo participates in the Species Survival Plan (SSP) for cheetahs, which is part of a program to save endangered species. Animal-care staff hope that Amani, our young female cheetah at the facility, will breed with one of the brothers, as recommended by the SSP. It will be up to her to choose which of the cheetahs, if any, she wants to breed with—the same type of breeding behavior that a female cheetah in the wild would display.
We can tell our cheetahs apart by looking at the stripes on their tails. Every cheetah's tail is unique, like people's fingerprints. Even the two sides of a cheetah's tail are different. 
Cheetah Fact Sheet
At the Zoo's Cheetah Conservation Station
Tumai was born at the Phoenix Zoo in 2000. Her name is Swahili for "hope." She arrived at the Zoo in May 2004 and has lived at the Cheetah Conservation Station and the Cheetah Science Facility at the Zoo's Conservation and Research Center (CRC) in Front Royal, Virginia, since then.
Giving hope to many, Tumai gave birth to a litter of four cubs—two males and two females—on November 23, 2004. This was the Zoo's first ever litter of cheetahs.
She weighs about 98 pounds.
At the Zoo's Cheetah Science Facility in Virginia
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Draco, Granger, and Zabini, three brothers born in 2005, came to the Zoo in April 2007 from White Oak Conservation Center in Yulee, Florida. They were transferred to the Virginia campus in November 2009. Their names come from characters in the Harry Potter series of novels by J.K. Rowling. They weigh 104 to 110 pounds each. |
Amani, the Zoo's young female cheetah, came to the Zoo in late December 2007 from Wildlife Safari, an animal park in Winston, Oregon.
Zazi, Swahili for "fertile" or "fruitful," was born at Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Texas in 2001. She came to the Zoo in June 2004.
Living up to her name, Zazi became a mother of five cubs—three females and two males—on April 14, 2005.
She weighs about 109 pounds.
Two litters of cheetahs were born at the Zoo in recent years: Four cheetahs—two males and two females—born on November 23, 2004, and five cheetahs—three girls and two boys—born on April 1, 2005. All of these cheetahs have left for other zoos.
The litter born in 2004 marked the the first cheetah births in the Zoo's history.
As part of the Cheetah Species Survival Plan, the males have gone to the Milwaukee County Zoo, and the females have gone to New Jersey's Cape May Zoo.
See the cubs' 
photo gallery.
The female cubs from the second litter left the Zoo in September 2006 for Disney's Animal Kingdom. The males went to Lowry Park Zoo in March 2007.
