Lion Gets Flipped into the Air

In this video clip, found on Youtube, a certain video provider called Barcroft TV shows a wild lion get flown into the air by a buffalo in Kruger National Park, South Africa. This clip was edited from the original footage that an eye witness account had filmed to fit the type of message this video source wanted to portray: sensationalism of natural occurrences. This video is a direct example of some of the very arguments that Malamud had raised in his essay “Zoo Spectatorship”, such as the voyeurism that humans have for animals, especially in feeding and dangerous situations. The TV provider that edited this clip had purposely manipulated the videos original footage to create a more attention grabbing, sensationalized video in order to pick up on the natural voyeuristic feeling that people have when viewing animals, such as Malamud had discussed in his essay.  In his essay Malamud tells his readers directly that the pleasure we get from watching animals eat/be in dangerous situations is “not about animals but about people, and that it is about us in disturbing ways” (Malamud 224). This feeling of excitement that humans get from watching animals eat, as he argues is not a positive feeling of curiosity and education, but rather has a darker meaning.

In this video, a female lion is attacking and constraining a wild buffalo, and out of the side of the video another buffalo attacks the lion, subsequently flipping the lion 5 meters into the air. The video was collected by tourists of the safari, who were riding in jeeps in order to view the animals. This video is further exaggerated by being shown in slow motion, and taking snap shots of the lion mid-air. The narrator of the video has an Australian, dramatic accent, which is the exact type of narrator that most viewers would expect to have for an animal safari video, a type of intense natural type of voice that will further exaggerate the viewers’ feeling of the natural phenomena that the video is depicting. The video is clipped into many short segments of clips, showing only the lions patiently waiting to attack, the lion trying to restrain the buffalo, and then many repeats of the lion getting flipped into the air, which shows us that the main purpose of the video is not to show the details of what was occurring, but rather to highlight the “action” that had taken place.. There is subtle, dramatic music in the background, trying to further our sensationalism of the buffalo attack by stimulating our feelings of danger and excitement. The video holds little to no educational information of lions nor wild buffalos, and rarely shows any human interaction with the animals. It begs to ask, if this video does not hold any educational purpose, what purpose does it really hold for our viewing?

Malamud would argue that this video is created only for our pleasure, much like zoos and other types of animal related videos. This video shows no educational purpose; its sole purpose is to excite our senses. As Malamud has pointed out, the ability for humans to watch over animals in their activities is a way of showing the binary opposition of humans and animals. “Spectators’ opportunity to watch everything animals do resembles on some level the power and pleasure that characterizes the disorder of voyeurism” (Malamud 221). He argues that the ability to watch over animals, in a more natural habitat such as this safari, or in a more common zoo setting, is the real reason that humans enjoy viewing animals, not for educational purposes. The empowerment of the individual viewers is even furthered by the fact that we are able to view this video endlessly from an enormous distance away from the scene of the action. By posting this video onto the internet, we can further distance ourselves from the animals involved in the video, and view them over and over again without their knowledge. This directly furthers the power we hold over animals in the binary opposition of human and animal.

These types of actions, as Malamud would depict, have nor true indication of how the wild truly is for the animals, just the types of scenes that will grab the most attention from the viewers. As Siebert has said, as quoted in Malamud’s essay “[nature shows offer] simultaneity of the unseen; of things you’d never see in a thousand walks in the wild” (Siebert 48). The types of nature shows broadcasted on TV, such as those on the Discovery Channel and Nat Geo wild, will often depict scenes and images of nature that are extremely uncommon, and these are the types of scenes that will produce the biggest exhilaration from the viewers. The uncommon action furthers the sensationalism added into this video.

Although nature shows in general “can help offer viewers expose to animals’ worlds in ways that [Malamud] believes zoos cannot” (Malamud 232), it is obvious that this video’s purpose is not to educate the viewers about the ways in which lions and buffalos act in nature, but rather to utilize the natural voyeurism that humans have towards viewing animals.

Malamud, Randy. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Print.

Siebert, Charles. “The Artifice of the Natural: How TV’s Nature Shows Make All the Earth a Stage.” Harper’s. February 1993: 43-51