Jan 30, 2010: Cheetahs Win

[xoxoxoBruce]

These three Cheetah brothers easily separated this Impala fawn from the herd. But then, evidently they weren't hungry, because they just played with it a little, then let it go.

Photographer Michel Denis-Huot, who captured these amazing pictures on safari in Kenya's Masai Mara in October last year, said he was astounded by what he saw.
'These three brothers have been living together since they left their mother at about 18 months old,' he said. 'On the morning we saw them, they seemed not to be hungry, walking quickly but stopping sometimes to play together.
'At one point, they met a group of impala who ran away. But one youngster was not quick enough and the brothers caught it easily.'
These extraordinary scenes followed, as the cheetahs played with the young impala the way a domestic cat might play with a ball of string.
'They knocked it down, but then they lost interest,' said Michel. 'For more than 15 minutes, they remained with the young antelope without doing anything other than licking it or putting their paws on the impala's head.'
Even more extraordinarily, this story has a happy ending - after one tense moment when it looked as though one cheetah would bite the impala on the neck, the youngster ran away.
Let's hope it didn't tell all its friends how nice those big, scarylooking cheetahs really are when you get to know them.

One very lucky Impala.
Maybe it made the boys melancholy, 'cause it smelled like Mama's breath.

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