Cheetahs elicit the sort of cat-lover sentimentality that makes me cringe. Something about the cheetah makes us patronise them. Maybe it’s because they are the only big cats that do not normally attack humans. Or maybe it’s because they can’t roar (they growl, hiss, purr and chirrup like a bird).

Approximately 1,300 cheetahs now live in captivity and approximately 12,000 in the wild. They have virtually vanished from Asia and dwindled to a rumour in North Africa. Their numbers are also diminishing south of the Sahara as the growing human population encroaches on old cheetah habitat. The single largest wild cheetah population - between 2,500 and 4,000 - lives in Namibia.

In South Africa most of the cheetahs have already vanished from open lands into zoos and game parks, which can be a reproductive dead-end because of the cheetahs’ complex mating behaviour and the potential for inadvertent in-breeding.

One evening I went to watch Shadow, a six-year-old male born in captivity, get his exercise. The exercise line, a bright rag on a ground-level wire pulley system, took off and he let out in pursuit until he pinned the rag down with his forepaws. As he lay panting on the ground, exhausted, he allowed me to handle the tyre-tread pads on his feet and the cleat-like, semi-retractable ‘dewclaw’ on his foreleg with which cheetahs snag and trip their prey.

The cheetah’s owner, Annie Beckhelling, was explaining to a group of tourists that cheetahs are relatively weak hunters. They can’t pierce a victim’s neck with their teeth as leopards do. The adaptations that make them such fast, efficient hunters also make them vulnerable at the moment of success to more powerful cats like the lion.

“Will any of the cheetahs be released into the wild?” asks one. “Without the skills passed on by its mother, captive cheetahs will not survive if released into the wild,” answers Beckhelling. Despite the apparent success of captive breeding programs no one is attempting to reintroduce these captive cheetahs into the wild. There are few places left in Africa or Asia big enough to accommodate cheetahs or willing to accept them due to the risk to livestock.

Cheetahs are not sturdy enough to defend themselves from either lion or hyena. 95% of cheetah cubs die before reaching independence. Hyenas kill them out of hunger, lions out of bad habit.

Cheetah populations apparently suffered a drastic decline 10,000 years ago and all cheetahs living today appear to be descended from a relative handful of survivors. Some scientists believe that genetic homogeneity make them vulnerable to disease. The cheetah is a conundrum: the fastest animal on land, an apparent model of evolutionary fitness, is also as inbred as the average lab mouse.

“The more information you get, the more fascinating an animal becomes,” says Elaine Durant, head of the Serengeti Cheetah Research Project. “It doesn’t matter if it shows that an animal is more peaceful than we thought, as gorillas seem to be, or more aggressive, as with chimps. It’s the information itself. Anything that makes people value the animal for what it is, rather than our fantasy of what it is, the better it is for that animal.”

Cheetah Outreach works to promote the cause of the cheetah by introducing captive-born, hand-reared cheetahs as ambassadors to increase awareness of the plight of Africa’s most endangered of the big cats and to ensure their survival in the wild through fundraising activities.

In one year Cheetah Outreach with Shadow visited more than 50,000 people, travelling to education facilities, community clubs, hotels shopping malls and various public events.

Shadow and the five other captive cheetahs housed at Cheetah Outreach are used as ambassadors of their species in order to help protect the remaining wild population. This beautiful creature is locked up in a miniscule enclosure and patronised by approximately 35,000 people per year with their zoom lenses and ‘here kitty-kitty’ sentiments. Yet without the tourists paying their R50 (about US$5) to ‘stroke a fury friend’ centres like Cheetah Outreach would not exist.

Nature seldom offers easy or reasonable trade offs. Yet if these cats can act as ambassadors to educate people of the plight of Africa’s most endangered cat then perhaps the balance can be reset. The hopeful upside is that somewhere in the thorny bush of Namibia a cheetah still ambles, doubtless thinking about its next meal.