Best Wild Animal Photos of 2012

Announced last Wednesday, these are the winners of the 2012 Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year. This is the 48^th year of the international competition, and as always, the entries are an amazing showcase of the world’s best nature photography across 18 separate categories. What’s interesting, though, is how the beauty of nature is juxtaposed against its horrors: we see breathtakingly vibrant emperor penguins and the first adrenaline-filled hunt of cheetah cubs, and then beside them is a strikingly lonely polar bear on a crumbling island of ice, and the horrifying mass carcasses of sharks harvested only for their fins. It is a reminder that yes, nature is brilliant and beautiful and wondrous, but it’s also wild and terrifying, and sometimes humans are the cause of it.