Fastest Animal

Ballyhoo for the Westminster Kennel Club's Annual Dog Show is usually composed of statistics, freaks, photographs of puppies. Last week's ballyhoo contained the customary information that more dogs (2,837) were entered than ever before, items about a singular creature called the Welsh Corgi, news that dachshunds outnumbered all other entries. Newsreaders, however, were flabbergasted at one new note in the ballyhoo. This was the Woolworth Donahue Cheetah. Before the show opened sports pages contained pictures of the cheetah and its trainer, Publisher Eltinge F. Warner of Field & Stream. When the show began, patrons viewed a cinema which showed the cheetah, by this time almost as legendary as a loup-garou, retrieving duck and pheasant.

Cheetahs, which look like little leopards, are the fastest animals in the world. A cheetah has been clocked at 103 ft. per second, twice the speed of a greyhound. In Africa cheetahs are used for hunting antelope. Hooded and chained, carried to the field in carts, they are released within 200 yd. of the game, restrained from eating their prey, when they have killed it, by being offered hot blood in a long-handled ladle. On an African hunting jaunt, Woolworth Donahue caught his cheetah when it was three months old, cured it of rickets by lime injections in its spine. By the time the cheetah recovered, it had developed such a fondness for its owner that Woolworth Donahue brought it back to the U. S. When he told his friends that he fed it on raw ducks, Publisher Warner got the idea of teaching the cheetah to retrieve. After two days the cheetah fetched dead or wounded ducks on land or in the water, delivered them instead of eating them. When hunting pheasant, the cheetah is less useful than a pointer. Instead of standing still, it runs after every bird, frequently catches one after it has flown by jumping in the air and knocking it down with one paw.

Only hunting cheetah in the U. S., the Donahue cheetah has no name, sleeps on his owner's bed or in a kennel. Last week, after helping publicize the dog show, the cheetah failed to return to its normal function, that of publicizing Woolworth Donahue. Instead, left to its own devices in the Donahue boathouse at Palm Beach, it quickly ran away.

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