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By Damien Whitworth
October 09, 2006 12:00am
Article from: The Australian
THE moon has set over the Kalahari and in the darkness it has become very hard to tell which shadowy lumps are bushes and which are lions. Suddenly, a member of the pride decides to make his whereabouts known.
A deep roar rends the African night; a great, bass groan that places the hunter spine-tinglingly close to our open-sided Jeep. We scramble for night-vision goggles. There he is, a brute of a male, not three metres from the vehicle. And he is not alone. We are surrounded by lions. After hours of inaction, the pride is on the move. The hunt is on.
"It's just unbelievable," mutters Jonny Keeling, a BBC wildlife producer clinging to the top of the Jeep next to me. "They're trying to kill again."
This is said with no satisfaction. Although a kill is what he has come to see, what the BBC is spending a great deal of money trying to record, the horror of what he fears is about to unfold on the plain fills him with dread.
A few years ago, stories began to emerge from Botswana that were so extraordinary wildlife experts struggled to believe them. According to guides in a remote area of Chobe National Park, a pride of lions had started attacking elephants. Driven by extreme hunger at the height of the dry season, when their normal prey was scarce, they had started by taking down baby elephants then moved on to adolescents and occasionally fully grown adults.
Lions are among the animal kingdom's most brutal and efficient predators but no one had heard of them hunting elephants before. The BBC's Natural History Unit decided to send a film crew to try to capture a hunt on film.
The lions hunt elephants because they have discovered that they can. The dry season has always been a desperate time for wildlife in northern Botswana. One year, perhaps, water, and therefore prey, was scarcer than ever and a small or weak elephant was killed in a moment of bold opportunism. Then there was no turning back.
When the roaring begins, it comes as such a surprise that we are surrounded by lions. The noise is intended to intimidate the herds passing through. The lionesses check out the elephants as they pass, looking for vulnerable targets.
There is quiet again. The pride appears to have gone back to sleep. But as a mother and an adolescent come through, slightly detached from the rest of a herd, two of the lionesses are instantly awake, on their feet and moving in. Pandemonium ensues.
The elephants trumpet with panic as they crash through the undergrowth. One of the lionesses jumps on the young elephant's back and another grabs its haunches. The hind-leg tendons are severed and the animal crashes to the ground. The rest of the lions pile in. The mother thunders off into the bush.
"Oh Christ, they've got one," murmurs Keeling as we catch up. The hunt, from the moment the lionesses spotted their victim until they felled it, lasted just 30 seconds.
The elephant takes a further 30 minutes to expire. The death agony is not pretty. The lions chew through tough hide and clamp their jaws around the elephant's trunk in an attempt to stop it breathing. The sound of the animal's gargling, wheezing and hissing is sickening and the lions provide a chilling accompaniment of low, contented growling. It is a hellish scene, all the more so for the faint red glow cast by the infra-red cameras.
There are scuffles as members of the pride jostle for position on the carcass. When they eventually can feast no more they pull away, their faces covered in blood, gore-stained up to their haunches. Panting with the exertion of gorging themselves, they lick each other's faces and flop down, exhausted.
"It seems irreverent watching a noble beast being killed. Elephants are such honourable animals," Keeling says grimly. "It's just unbelievable. The lions are trying to kill every night, even though their bellies are full. They are just machines."
He is already worrying about the graphic nature of the footage. "We will have to be judicious about how we use it, so it's not too gory."
A year later, back in Britain, the lions and elephants sequence for the Planet Earth program Great Plains has been created from weeks of filming. The footage has been carefully edited but is nevertheless an uncompromising piece of film, possibly the most shocking natural history footage you will have seen, up there with the film of killer whales hunting sea lions that jolted viewers out of their armchairs back in 1990.
David Attenborough, who narrates, says the filmmaker's job is "to make it tolerable" for a television audience.
"People accuse us of the pornography of violence. But if they saw it (in real life), as you have done, they would see the difference between how we produced it and how it was shot."
Once again, a BBC film crew, working under incredibly challenging conditions, has succeeded in capturing the brutal realities of the natural world in a way we haven't seen before. If you retain any sentimental feelings about lions, prepare to lose them.
Feline death-machines rock, but I'm biased.
It's not that I'm unforgiving, it's that most of the people who wrong me are unrepentant assholes.
