It’s exciting to see high-octane chases between deadly predators and evasive prey, but it’s not always clear who to root for. We don’t want the predators to starve, but we also want the prey to escape.
Nachi Mirkin caught this warthog piglet on camera as it put its whole heart and soul into that escape near the Crocodile Bridge at the Kruger National Park. With hungry lions closing in, this escape became dramatic and tense.
Running For Its Life
At the beginning of Nachi’s footage the piglet had managed to get a road between itself and the lion, but the huge feline was closing in. Its larger relative size meant it could cover ground much quicker than the tiny little piglet.
That wasn’t going to stop the little piglet from doing its very best though, as this was a literal matter of life and death and adrenaline was working wonders on its ability to build up speed.
With first one, then multiple lions in hot pursuit the piglet dove into the short grass at the side of the road where it would have been less visible if it hadn’t been like a streak of lightning across the ground.
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Putting The Flight In Fight Or Flight
Lions are apex predators, capable of using their strength and ambush tactics to bring down prey much larger and heavier than them. Despite this, they were struggling to keep up with the piglet, let alone catch it.
Every time the lions got close to the little warthog it launched itself in a brand new direction in the blink of an eye. The lumbering big cats lacked the same maneuvering ability and had to try and catch up all over again.
Even in a straight line the piglet was able to crank up the speed so much that the two hungry lionesses in pursuit just couldn’t keep up. Little legs moving fast enough to be a blur kept the piglet just ahead of them at all times, which meant they kept the piglet alive.
A Test Of Endurance And Patience
If the piglet could keep this up without its strength giving out or its little heart failing, then there was a good chance it was going to make it out of this situation alive. Lions aren’t endurance runners and they would have other hunting opportunities.
That meant this hunt wasn’t a life or death situation for them in the same way that it was for the piglet and they were unlikely to put quite the same amount of effort into it. Lions like these would have preferred an ambush where they capture their prey before it even knows it’s being hunted.
In the background there was another warthog running parallel to the chase for a few moments before disappearing, which implied that these lions had tried to lay an ambush only for it to fail spectacularly, and scatter a group of hogs into the brush around them.
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Disappointed And Exhausted
In the end, the piglet’s tiny legs proved to be more than a match for the large muscled lions, and it managed to get away from them before they could actually catch it.
This meant that David had overcome Goliath, and the large and deadly lions were going to have to go hungry after failing to capture something that wasn’t significantly larger than their paws.
