rop out of a tree on unsuspecting prey.)
This reliance on speed and not much else means that cheetahs don't have the tools to fight off other predators who want to steal their dinner. Even an unarmed human can walk up to a cheetah and take away its catch. The cats also have trouble protecting their babies – lions in particular are known to kill cheetah cubs as a way of eliminating bush rivalry. This is one of the reasons why cheetahs don't do well in wildlife reserves, where limited space increases competition among predators.
To avoid these run-ins, the cheetah hunts during the day – the only cat to do so. But daytime hunting has its own perils: humans. When livestock goes missing, farmers are more likely to see a cheetah on the prowl than any other cat. So while cheetahs are certainly responsible for taking their share of unattended goats, they also often get blamed – and killed – for other cats' hunting.
"When there is a dead whatever, the first reaction is to say 'A cheetah got it,' " Jones says. "Then retaliatory killings take place."
Duma shows this story, too. He and his sister were rescued as cubs after a farmer shot and killed their mother.
An effort to educate
One of the main goals of southern Africa's cheetah conservation groups is to persuade farmers to use nonlethal predator control – using herd guard dogs to scare off cheetahs, for instance, or building cheetahproof fences around grazing fields. This goes hand in hand with convincing locals that there is value in the cheetah, both environmental and economic.
In Namibia, for instance, where the cheetah population has stabilized and even grown, Ms. Marker's Cheetah Conservation Fund has held training courses for thousands of schoolchildren and hundreds of subsistence farmers, talking about ecosystem stability, the role of predators, and the unique aspects of the cheetah.
Across the border, Cheetah Conservation Botswana recently published a book called "Cheetah: A predator resource for the children of Botswana," which it hopes to distribute to every secondary school in the country. It has also held teacher training sessions modeled on Marker's program and launched a conservation video, "Spirit of the Kalahari," starring local actors.
"We deal with an integrated system of people learning to live with wildlife, predators," Marker says. "We study the needs of the people, and the predators."
More than three decades of biological research underlie these outreach efforts, Marker adds – work on everything from how many cheetah exist in a region to the cats' range and breeding patterns.
"We probably know more about the biology of the cheetah than most other endangered species," Marker says.
Conservation groups also research farming practices, such as corralling young calves, which can minimize human-cat conflict.
While conservationists say they are seeing attitudes shift, they also know they have a long road ahead.
This past year, two orphaned cheetah cubs that Cheetah Conservation Botswana had rehabilitated were shot and killed after they were reintroduced into the wild. The group had released them on property owned by a supportive farmer, but the cats had roamed onto other, less friendly land.
"It's going to be a generational thing," Jones says. "The predator-livestock issue won't be solved in our lifetime. It will be changed in the next three, four generations."