Gore splattered on my camera

Since yesterday was my day off, I thought I might as well go and get some video of the cheetah and leopard feeding. Once again the guide let me sit in the passenger’s seat of the battered old safari vehicle with no doors. However, this time he parked the passenger side on the side of the cheetahs! The cheetah’s were literally 2 feet away. If I had been so inclined I could have reached out and poked them in the eye. Yan (the guide who feeds the cheetah) sat next to me on the passenger seat and fed the cheetah from there so he could give the tourists in my truck some better photo angles. I had my video camera rolling the whole time. I was so close I couldn’t pan back far enough to get a good shot.

Yan was throwing the meat into the air and the cheetahs were catching it about three feet away. I don’t know whether it was the backsplash from a meat toss, or whether it flew from the cheetah’s gnashing jaws, but a small chunk of meat flew up in the air and landed squarely on my video camera.

So, technically, my camera was splattered with gore during a cheetah feeding frenzy. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I’ll be old and grey and sitting in a nursing home and the people around me will be saying “oh no, not that gore-

on-the-camera story again.” Of course by then I’ll have embellished the story to last just over an hour and it will start something like “Now listen, you young whippersnapper! You think your cat is ferocious! Let me tell you the story of when I was young and working on a safari farm in Namibia. Now we didn’t have those puny house cats you have today. Noooooo. We kept wild cheetah to play with. Some had three legs. Some had four legs. But if they had their mind set, they would rip you limb from limb like nobody’s business. One day as I was feeding the cheetah . . . . . . .” I chose not to spoil a good story with the truth like “the cheetahs on the farm are almost tame”, “I was never in any danger”, “cheetah aren’t particularly dangerous and would never attack a human.” (This last paragraph is for the sake of my Mum – just in case she is reading this and gets needlessly worried that I’m taking risks.)