CHEETAH
Namiri Plains, Serengeti · Mama Sita and her family
The hunt I could not photograph.
MASAI MARA, KENYA
My first morning in the Masai Mara, I watched five cheetah brothers take down a topi.
What I was not prepared for was the strategy. Each brother had a role. They moved in silence across the open savannah, spread wide, and waited. Below them, a mother topi was licking her newborn clean — the calf still unsteady on its legs, still wet.
I had my camera raised. Then I put it down.
It moved too fast for the lens. The dust, the sound of hooves, the five brothers coming from every angle simultaneously. What brought the topi down in the end was not speed. It was the moment she looked back to find her calf. That single backward glance. And they were on her from all sides.
With the camera at my side, I watching the calf run.
I had never felt joy and sorrow at the same time so completely. Africa would keep teaching me that lesson — that life and death are not opposites here. They are the same breath.
What the Cheetah Carries
People ask what the cheetah means — as a symbol, as a presence, as an animal that has followed human civilisation for thousands of years.
Dating back to 1700 BC, the Egyptians kept cheetahs not as pets but as emblems of royalty. That reverence never disappeared.
It simply changed shape.
I can only tell you what I have observed.
A cheetah does not announce itself. It is the fastest land animal on earth and yet it hunts in full daylight — no ambush, no darkness, no advantage except precision and the willingness to commit completely.
When it fails — and it fails more than it succeeds — it reads the landscape and moves again.
That is the symbol. Not speed. Not power.
Readiness.
Remove the cheetah and the landscape changes. That is not metaphor. It is documented ecology.
As skilled predators, cheetahs play a critical role in maintaining the balance of their ecosystem. By controlling prey populations, a single healthy cheetah territory can shape the movement of entire herds — and with it, the grasslands they graze.
In the past four decades, cheetahs have lost 77% of their historical range. They now occupy less than 9% of the land they once moved through freely — pushed out by habitat loss, human conflict, and the illegal wildlife trade.
The cheetah population confronts serious threats including habitat loss, human conflict, climate change, prey scarcity, and the illegal trade of cubs into the exotic pet market.
Fewer than 7,100 remain in the wild.
Of those, only around 1,900 are in protected areas. The rest move through unprotected land — corridors shared with livestock, farms, and roads.
This is why the conservancy matters. This is why where I choose to photograph matters.
Together in this uncompromising wilderness, their first weapon is one another.
7,100
LEFT IN THE WILD
The cheetah is Africa’s most endangered big cat. Not the most famous. The most endangered.
EXOTIC CAPTIVES
Cheetahs have been kept by royalty and ruling classes for over 5,000 years — valued for their speed, their trainability, their stillness in captivity.
That history has never fully ended.
Today, cheetahs are caught illegally across the Horn of Africa and sold into the exotic pet trade, primarily into the Arabian Peninsula. The price for a live cub runs to $8,000 or more. The survival rate in captivity is poor. Most die within a year.
For every cub that reaches a buyer, several more die in transit.
The demand does not come from poverty. It comes from status. And it is one of the quietest, least-reported drivers of cheetah decline on the continent.
field notes
The Cheetah
Claw tips always visible
Purr, don’t roar
~2,000 spots
Males form small groups
Semi-retractable claws
Black tear marks block sun
Speed up to 128 km/h
Light, aerodynamic frame
Turn mid-air while sprinting
Long tail for balance
