A lot of African safari time is spent driving around looking, listening, and (yes) smelling for something. Kills, not surprisingly, have a pretty distinct odor, particularly if they’ve been there a while. However, predators don’t kill to add to the olfactory experience, they want to eat, so you usually don’t have a lot of stuff left over, and you can’t smell it at too much of a distance. Thus, when we smelled a kill on a drive, we looped around looking for evidence. We didn’t find anything and our rangers and tracker discussed what that meant. Nothing local to the small meant either there was nothing but perhaps some fluid left, or that it was big and further away. We didn’t hear hyenas or see vultures so it was a question-mark…for the moment.
The next day, we were astonished to come upon a dead hippo. We were nowhere near the water, and the hippo carcass was almost completely intact. It appeared to our experts that the hippo had died of natural causes, and when it did it’s legs gave out and it simply collapsed onto its stomach. This covered the part of the carcass that predators could access easily; hippo hide is very tough. Hyenas were trying to feed, with some focusing on soft facial parts and others trying to reach the tender skin under the animal.
What surprised us was that a pack of wild dogs then came along. Wild dogs are hunters, meaning that they very rarely scavenge, and we believed at first that this was just another example of two highly competitive predators trying to tweak each other’s noses. Even when a few dogs tried to grab a scrap off the carcass, we thought it was just to rile the hyenas. Not so.
The video Incident Report: Wild Dog and Hyena Fight over Hippo Carcass shows what happened when the wild dogs decided that there was just way too much food there to ignore. Early on the dogs were kept away because there were too many hyenas, but even a big pack of hyenas can’t eat a hippo, and so eventually the hyenas slunk off to sleep off their feeding, leaving only two to guard the carcass. They’d managed to dig a tunnel down to the soft part of the hippo, and when the dogs approached, one of the hyenas actually laid down in the tunnel to guard it. In another interaction, a wild dog and a hyena actually snarled and bit at each other while each had its head in the skull remains of the hippo!
Most guests didn’t see all the action here, and probably the big reason was the smell. Nobody can describe just how bad a large carcass smells, and this was one where some people had to put something over their nose and mouth. Then there was the dust and the flies. It was not a pleasant situation, but if you want to see wildlife action you have to put up with a lot of things, including smells.