Lions are the only other social cats, and their prides consist of a small group of males living with a much larger group of females. There were three cubs born, two males and one female, but none of them survived for more than a month. In the early fifth century, Italian nobles used the cats to hunt . In the thirteenth century, Kublia Khan, the Founder of the Chinese Mongol dynasty, kept hundreds of cheetahs. Akbar, a Mongolian ruler of the sixteenth century, is said to have owned 9,000 cheetahs, from which only one litter was produced.
Cheetahs do indeed have trouble reproducing in captivity.
Of the three hundred or so cheetahs living in North American zoos, only eighteen percent have reproduced.