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Gaining Trust It is a very special moment when you
gain the confidence of a wild animal. When we first encountered the cheetah family, we
could not approach within 300 meters of them. It was an hour before sunset,
when, for the first time, I spotted the unforgettable profiles of the cheetahs right in
the open, on the edge of the Pan. It was an unusually large family: a mother with five
cubs, and another adult female, possibly from a previous litter. I was determined to get to
know them. After a few weeks of patient following, they accepted us to the extent that we
were not only driving alongside them, but they were killing prey close to the car.
Creating the relationship with the animals you work with takes time and a lot of it. When
following the cheetah family, it was necessary to change our rhythm of living to match
theirs. Their day begins before |
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it gets light and ends after dark. During the
day they can cover vast distances, often through the thick bush and places where no
vehicle can go. Often, we would struggle to keep up, trying to maintain a discreet
distance so as not to irritate them. Once, we lost track of them completely and searched
in vain for them for almost two weeks, until, at the point of giving up, and some 50
miles from where I had last seen them, I was distracted by a female springbok that looked
as though she was about to give birth. I needed to film a springbok birth anyway, so I
decided to stay with her. That afternoon was to be an unforgettable one. I had been
watching the springbok for several hours when suddenly an eruption of a herd of fleeing
springbok running in my direction suggested that a cheetah was in hot pursuit. Through the
confusion of running legs, I spotted not one cheetah but seven; it was my family.  |
