Cheetah Game Theory

The Daily Mail reports on an act of kindness by three cheetahs, who decide against eating a baby antelope and play with it instead. It's possible that this baby antelope was just too cute to eat, but it seems more likely that the cheetahs weren't hungry, just bored. The Mail also insinuates that this is evidence of a cheetah conspiracy to subvert the antelope population, though for a predator that's clearly faster than its prey this has got to be over doing it. In poker, this would be called fancy play syndrome. By the way, this article on swarm theory is really cool and shows how a herd of antelope can be so good at confusing faster predators.