Cheetah

The claws are only semi-retractable, working as sprinting studs. The tail is a rudder, the spine flexes like a bow, and the nasal passages are enlarged for oxygen at the cost of the jaw anchorage that other cats use to hold large prey. A cheetah accelerates faster than most road cars and overheats within a minute — the hunt is won or abandoned inside four hundred metres.

That specialisation makes it a poor competitor. Lions and hyenas take a large share of cheetah kills, and a cheetah that fights loses the leg it needs. Add to that a genetic bottleneck from the late Pleistocene, which has left the species with unusually low diversity, and the free-ranging population now sits near seven thousand adults, most of them outside protected areas.