The beautiful cheetah lies unconscious on the operating table as the world’s finest vets battle to mend her shattered back leg. I watch as they pin the limb together with two titanium plates in a meticulous three-hour operation at an animal hospital in India, where cheetahs were hunted to extinction 80 years ago.
‘A maharaja killed the last three cheetahs in 1947, but he will have fired from an English-made rifle,’ muses Professor Gerard Steenkamp, the vet who operated on the animal with an eight-strong medical team.
The young cheetah, called Dorcas, was flown here in 2024 from a South African sanctuary
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