REALITY SHOWS regularly feature contestants eating maggots, swimming with snakes, and jumping off cliffs. But none has ended in people tearing one another apart, limb from limb, the victors feasting on the flesh of the losers. This might happen next season but in the meantime, there’s the National Geographic Channel, which delivers what no other reality show can: a contest ending in brutal death.
Sadly the victims aren’t the obnoxious jock or the bubbly bimbo. Rather, they are the buffalo and the antelope. Predators at War (airing this Sunday at 9:00 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel) takes place in South Africa’s Mala Mala game reserve where a severe drought has broken down the territorial boundaries separating some of the fiercest carnivores on Earth, namely, the lion, the leopard, and the hyena. Complicating matters, two “wild cards” have entered the reserve: the cheetah and the African wild dog. By nature, none of these predators are out to eat each other. Instead, they fight over the same sources of food. Viewers are treated to up close shots of this competition–and the gory results, thanks to the incredible footage of Kim Wolhuter, a former ranger who knows no fear (think less Steve Irwin and more Robert Muldoon, the game warden in Jurassic Park played by the late Bob Peck).
At first, the scene is quite typical. A leopard–“few can match it for sheer deadly ambush power” says the narrator–stalks an antelope and takes it down with a fatal snap of the neck. But then the notorious Charleston clan of hyenas arrives, wrestling away the carcass from the leopard who gives up without much of a fight. The hyena has the strongest jaw of any mammal on the planet, exerting roughly 1,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. And even then the struggle over the antelope (now thoroughly disemboweled) isn’t over, because the lions have just entered the scene. Intimidated by their strength and size, the hyenas choose to flee and fight another day.
It doesn’t always work out this way. As naturalists are quick to point out, weather, health, and numbers all play critical roles. The water buffalo, for instance, is generally large enough to fend off an emboldened predator half its size. But when lions (lionesses to be exact) spot an elderly buffalo in the herd at night–the time when lions and leopards rule–size becomes less significant. Wolhuter’s camera captures five lions overpowering the weak giant, then attempting to choke it. Miraculously, the herd remains, keeping the lions temporarily at bay while they try to nurse the now badly bleeding buffalo. But it cannot stand on its own and eventually the herd decides to leave. Normally a lion will kill its prey by wrapping its mouth around the neck, either breaking the windpipe or crushing the cervical vertebrae. But since the buffalo can no longer put up a fight–and because there are five hungry lions–this time the prey is devoured alive.
DESPITE SUCH DOMINANCE, fewer than half the lion cubs ever make it to adulthood, even under normal circumstances. In drought-stricken conditions, the rate is dangerously low. A lioness tries to revive one of her young but it has died of starvation. Slowly, with her remaining cubs, she moves on. In no time, a hyena comes up to the carcass, sniffs it, and trots away with the prize. When a cheetah successfully hunts down an impala (these antelopes can run 40 m.p.h. but are no match against the cheetah, which can reach speeds of 70 m.p.h.), a hyena lies in wait, eager to steal the hard-earned prize.
It’s easy to see how the hyena gets a bad reputation, cackling sinisterly while thriving on the food of others, but it would be a mistake to deem them either cowardly or simplistic. Dr. Micaela Szykman, a post-doctoral research fellow with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, considers the hyena to be smarter than any of the other predators mentioned–she ought to know, since she earned her Ph.D. while studying the behavior of the spotted hyena in Kenya. “The hyenas are certainly going out there and stealing kills from other predators but they are also great hunters. . . . They chase them down, pull them apart, and eviscerate them.” She also notes that hyenas are more socially complex than lions, leopards, and cheetahs. “Intelligence seems to come with increasing complexity. So dolphins are smart because they are socially complex and primates are smart because they too are socially complex. Hyenas actually live very much in primate-like societies.”
Hyenas are well-designed killing machines: Their front teeth are meant to shred flesh while the rear teeth crush bones (and their stomach acids dissolve those bones easily). As another zoo official pointed out to me, “What other mammal can break a gazelle’s femur with its jaws?”
And yet the hyenas are only part of the documentary’s focus. Though smaller than their competitors, African wild dogs are very disciplined and attack in large groups. When one hyena loses its clan and is surrounded by about 20 wild dogs, the hunter suddenly becomes the hunted. Meanwhile, as food and water become scarce, some of the predators resort to cannibalism, an act that even disturbs Wolhuter. Szykman too has witnessed cannibalism among the hyenas. “You can actually see them wrinkle their noses as if it doesn’t even taste good,” she says.
The war among the predators finally ends when the rain comes. The natural order is restored. At times, Predators at War can overdramatize the situation, using computer graphics, thermal imaging, and militarizing the conflict. The narrator describes the “uneasy truce” about to be broken and asks, “Which forces will get out alive when the predators go to war?” (Even the press release describes Wolhuter as “embedding himself with the troops.”) The show is also extremely graphic, such as when the camera noses up to a hyena feeding on an antelope, its mouth slathered in blood and entrails–in other words, aside from the deeper sociological and biological ramifications, it has all the ingredients for a gripping reality show.
What is remarkable is Wolhuter’s ability to get up close to these ferocious carnivores. He doesn’t shrink away, even when some of the predators start looking hungrily at him. And brave as he is, he’s not alone. Szykman herself once spent four hours with some 27 African wild dogs. The most amazing thing she’s ever seen? “I watched a leopard and a hyena fight over a wildebeest. The leopard had killed the wildebeest and the hyena wanted to steal it. But the leopard was clearly hungry and wouldn’t give it up. It became a tug of war and they ended up both feeding on it. They compromised. The hyena ate from one end while the leopard ate from the other. The hyena is such an efficient eater. It ate its fill in about 30 minutes, about 22 pounds of meat, and left the remainder to the leopard.”
Szykman is currently working at the National Zoo’s Conservation and Research Center in Virginia, where rare and endangered species are cared for. But she hopes to one day reintroduce African wild dogs to areas where they once roamed. “And obviously,” she says, “competition is going to be a part of it, bringing wild dogs into an area inhabited by lions.”
Sounds like another reality show in the works.
Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
