The Asiatic cheetah

On the gravel plains of Touran, in Semnan province, a cheetah can stand on a low rise and see for miles: salt crust, saxaul scrub, the dust trail of a running gazelle. This is the last country of the Asiatic cheetah. The subspecies once ranged from the Arabian Peninsula across Iran and Central Asia to India. Today it survives in the wild only in Iran, where only a few dozen are thought to remain, and it is listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN.

A companion of the hunt

In Persian the animal is yuzpalang, literally the yuz panther; older texts often call it simply yuz. For centuries it belonged less to the wilderness than to the court. Persian and later Mughal nobles kept tamed cheetahs for coursing: the cat was carried to the hunt hooded, sometimes on horseback behind a rider, then unhooded and slipped at antelope. Painters of the period liked the scene, a spotted cat in a jewelled collar waiting for its moment. The cheetah was prized because it could be trained, an odd compliment for an animal that has always bred reluctantly in captivity, which meant every hunting cheetah had first to be caught wild.

A national cause

The modern cheetah is less a hunter's tool than a national conscience. Its image appeared on the shirts of Iran's football team at the 2014 World Cup, and conservationists have spent years working with rangers and herders across the plateau against the things that kill it: speeding traffic on desert roads, the loss of gazelle and wild sheep to poaching and overgrazing, and shepherds' dogs. A cheetah killed on the road is reported in the Iranian press almost as an obituary. Few Iranians will ever see one. Most know the yuz from camera-trap photographs: a lean, small-headed cat caught at night beside a spring, eyes catching the flash, looking back at a country that has decided, late but in earnest, to keep it.