Before the tragic events that unfolded this weekend, the Cincinnati Zoo posted this video of a cheetah named Savanna from the Zoos Cat Ambassador program to get a firsthand look — possibly for the first time ever — of what it’s like to run with a cheetah. To accomplish this, Savanna’s trainers outfitted her with a harness affixed with a GoPro to capture her running at full speed.
Aside from it just being cool footage, what the GoPro captured was informative as well. As the Cincinnati Zoo employee featured in the video points out, “When you see it in slow motion, what amazed me is it seems like their head stays fairly steady, but their body’s going wild.” Alicia Sampson, from the ambassador program agrees. “When you saw it really, really slow, that head just pretty much never moves, even though that body was going up and down and up and down. But the back of her head was just there, pretty much the whole time in the same spot.”
In other words, while it may be neat to see a cheetah’s point of view, you probably wouldn’t actually want to ride one. Because aside from you possibly crushing the cheetah, it would probably be one heck of a bumpy ride.