Cheetah

6: Cheetah, Peter Masters 2018   

This superb creature is an African cheetah. I photographed him at Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo. It’s wonderful for photographers there. You have an absence of cages, an absence of fences. But I’ve always been ambivalent about zoos, thinking of course that an animal should just be in the wild.    

But zoos like Dubbo Western Plains Zoo do wonderful conservation work. They really do try to reintroduce animals into the wild wherever possible and work globally to work on ways to preserve what we have. Many of the creatures that you can see at Dubbo would not exist at all on the planet anymore if it wasn’t for the work of zoos such as this.    

This lovely animal is the fastest creature on earth. But what I really like about it is the face - that beautiful tears, that black tear line that comes down from the corner of the eye, there are many African myths and stories about the tears of the cheetah.   

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Newcastle Libraries · Cheetah