Harrowing images show a heartbroken dairy farmer shooting 20 of his cows after they suffered severe burns in the Australian bushfires.
The ongoing disaster has killed 18 people, destroyed thousands of homes and ravaged vast areas of land, with no end yet in sight.
And now images have emerged showing Steve Shipton, of Coolagolite, in New South Wales, turning his gun on his own animals, blasting them in the head to end their suffering.
Coolagolite is in one of the worst-hit areas of Australia. The fires have torn through southern coastal areas of New South Wales.
The distressing and gory images show the poor animals in great suffering with terrible burns.
In one, Steve blasts an adult cow in the head from close range with a rifle.
In another he inspects a calf's burns having just put it out of its misery.
In another picture, fellow farmers Bernie Smith and Peter Mercieca try to comfort him after the necessary - but heart-wrenching - deed is done.
He then shakes the hand of a vet and thanks him for helping him with the distressed and wounded animals.
Fires swept through Mr Shipton's land and buildings and he has lost roughly a tenth of his herd.
Since September the bushfires have killed 18 people and destroyed more than 1,200 homes across New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria.
An estimated 480million animals have died.
At least eight people have died this week in NSW and neighbouring Victoria, Australia's two most-populous states, where more than 200 fires are currently burning.
Authorities said 381 homes had been destroyed on the NSW southern coast this week, while 18 people have died since the fires began burning.
Some 12.35 million acres of land - an area almost the size of Croatia - have burned nationwide over the past few months, with more than 1,300 homes destroyed.
Thousands of tourists have fled ahead of worsening conditions as the military started to evacuate people trapped on the shore further south.
New blazes are sparked almost daily by extremely hot and windy conditions and, most recently, dry lightning strikes created by the fires themselves.
Ecologist Mark Graham told the Australian parliament in December that koalas - the beloved animal which is one of the symbols of Australia - "really have no capacity to move fast enough to get away" as fires spread.
And his depressing assessment continued: “The fires have burnt so hot and so fast that there has been significant mortality of animals in the trees, but there is such a big area now that is still on fire and still burning that we will probably never find the bodies.
“We’ve lost such a massive swathe of known koala habitat that I think we can say without any doubt there will be ongoing declines in koala populations from this point forward.”
- Donate to a GoFundMe page for Mr Shipton and the community, started by the photographer of these images.
