My wife Angie and I have spent much of our careers as photographers focusing on big cats in the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya, but when each of us won Wildlife Photographer of the Year it was with pictures of different species. Angie’s winner was of elephants looking at a heron. Mine was this, which was taken in 1987, before Angie and I met. Having lived for over a decade in Africa, and published books about lions and leopards, I’d travelled down to the Serengeti to work on one about the great migration, keen to see what the wildebeest do during the wet season. While there, I realised there was also a story to be told about the wild dogs that make dens on the southern plains at that time, when food is most plentiful, as they’re raising their puppies.
It took me six years to get all the pictures I needed for my book The Leopard’s Tale – they are extremely difficult animals to photograph. So I loved the contrast of switching to the most social carnivore and pack-hunting of animals. I’d got permission to live in my car for weeks, even months, at a time – which meant I could follow the wild dogs without having to travel back and forth. I was at the den 24/7.
As well as wild dogs raising and suckling their pups, there were two shots I really wanted to capture. One was when the dogs were chasing their prey. For that, I would be driving at a distance, but parallel to the hunt if I could, one knee on the steering wheel, leaning out of the window with a 70-200mm zoom lens, trying not to hit an anthill or go down a warthog burrow. I was using film, of course, and having to focus manually. I got the shot of a wild dog chasing wildebeest, which was the runner-up the year this photograph won.
This was the other shot I’d wanted: that dramatic moment when the pack has chased down its prey. While some of the dogs caught the wildebeest by the tail and back legs, trying to anchor it, one would run around the front, leap up and grab the nose and upper lip. I knew exactly what the shot would look like – and bam, there it was. I took it towards the end of the day and would have loved a bit of backlight through the wildebeest’s mane, but when I saw it at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, blown up into a big print, it did look very dramatic.
I certainly don’t agree with people who say: “You’re glorifying violence.” The wild dog is doing what it has evolved to do. The beauty and wonder of the prey animals – the speed of the impala, the incredible fleetness and zigzagging of the Thomson’s gazelle, the alertness, the sharp eyes, the horns – are due to the pressure of predation. It’s life and death because predators have to kill to survive. Hugo van Lawick and Jane Goodall perhaps put it best in the title of their book about hyenas, wild dogs and jackals: Innocent Killers.
If you’re as passionate about nature as I am, you get so immersed in the world of the wild creatures that you feel part of it. Your human persona almost vanishes and you are just present in that moment. There would be many times when the dogs wouldn’t have food to take back to their puppies, and I was totally invested in seeing the intricacies of what it takes to raise them, and how difficult that can be.
When the puppies start emerging from the den they can be killed by lions, or their food can be stolen by hyenas. Humans too were once out on those plains, competing for food with the large predators and probably scavenging and stealing from them. There’s a connection there, and an adrenaline rush when you see a cheetah sprint after prey. It’s not that you want to see something die. But at the same time, you’re fascinated by the whole process.
Jonathan Scott’s image features in 60 Years of Wildlife Photographer of the Year: How Wildlife Photography Became Art, available now in hardback from nhmshop.co.uk
Jonathan Scott’s CV
Born: 1949, London
Trained: Zoology degree, Queen’s University Belfast
Influences: Sir Peter Scott, David Attenborough, Armand and Michaela Denis, the 1966 film Born Free, philosopher Joseph Campbell
High point: “Marrying Angela atop the Siria Escarpment in the Maasai Mara in 1992”
Low point: “Failing the entrance exam to Christ’s Hospital School, Horsham, West Sussex, aged eight or nine. Fortunately I was given a second chance”
Top tip: “Only buy the equipment you really need, secondhand if possible. Create your own projects. Look at what other top photographers have achieved at destinations or with subjects you want to work with – then be as different and as innovative as possible”
