Perhaps the better question is: “were there white cheetahs?” because I had never heard of someone seeing a white cheetah these days until today (see below). Have you heard of modern day white cheetahs? If so please tell us. That said, both black and white cheetahs have been recorded. They are exceptionally rare it seems.
I’ll quote a small section of text from Wild Cats of the World:
“In India, the Emperor Jahangir described a white cheetah presented to him by Raja Bir Singh Deo in 1608 as having blue spots on a whitish-blue coat.”
Two partially albino cheetahs were recorded by a person named Sclater in South Africa in 1877-1878.
For the sake of completeness there is a record of two black cheetahs, one from Kenya and the other from Zambia. That’s it from the best book on wild cats.
P.S. a photographer, Guy Coombs, snapped what has been described as a white cheetah only the cat is not white but fawn colored with some small darks spots. Is this is an excellent example of photo editing? If it is, it is a superb piece of work. The cat has been described as a cryptid – a mysterious creature.
Unfortunately the subspecies that produced white, and also greyish, cheetahs was in India and has been lost. Cheetahs were captured for use in hunting, and the colour morphs were captured as curiosities, but cheetahs did not breed well in captivity. As a result those mutant lines were lost.
There has been talk of reintroducing cheetahs into India from African stock.