Researchers from the University of Belfast say the decline of cheetahs is not caused by large predators but by humans.

They said that human activity may cause cheetahs to use more energy that might cause their major decline.

They added that the decline of cheetahs from 100,000 to 10,000 was blamed on large predators, who previous researchers thought monopolized food that are available in their habitat.

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Previous researchers thought that their decline was caused by insufficient prey to sustain their ability for super-fast chases.

Through this study, researchers found out that cheetah's do not use more energy than other mammals with the same size.

However, when the cheetahs run, they lose much of the energy, and when prey is hard to come by because of human takeover, the balance goes haywire.

For this study, researchers studied 19 free roaming cheetahs that can be found on the Kalahari desert and wetter areas of South Africa.

The cheetahs were injected with heavy water. The researchers then tracked down the loss of this water to calculate their energy expenditures.

They found out that cheetahs have the ability to withstand other species, but couldn't do much against human activity.

They said that by erecting fences on the habitat of the cheetahs for safe passage of humans and hunting the prey of cheetahs they are forcing the cheetahs to search out farther for food, costing them more energy.

Researchers believe that these results can improve human understanding of the challenges that cheetahs have to face in order to survive.

This can also improve on the future conservation strategies of the cat species and other threatened animals, they added.