In becoming a lethal speedster – the fastest land animal on the planet – specialised for the hunting of small antelope, the cheetah has sacrificed the brawn of its fellow big cats for a lean, light, stretched-out build.
A short-lived feast. Image: Derek Keats
Keats was watching five cheetahs feasting on a freshly killed springbok in the South African portion of the huge Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park shared with Botswana when a brown hyena ambled over. Scavenging unconcernedly alongside the cheetahs, the hyena set about gnawing off the hindquarters of the antelope, which it then wandered away with.
Dinner … interrupted. Image: Derek Keats
Hyena steals a share … and legs it. Image: Derek Keats
Image: Derek Keats
Unfortunately for the cheetah quintet, the hyena wasn’t through: it reappeared not long after, hurrying back to the carcass and then summarily hauling off the rest of it.
“The cheetahs looked absolutely dejected,” Keats wrote in a post over at Africa Geographic. “The jackals then took their change to move in, cleaning up the intestines and other nasty bits.”
Image: Derek Keats
Image: Derek Keats
Image: Derek Keats
The jackals move in to clean up the leftovers. Image: Derek Keats
What Keats saw is typical brown-hyena scavenging behaviour. The animal often shears off a leg from a carcass and caches it several hundred yards away, then returns for more.