ABSTRACT

It’s about 5:30 in the morning. I’m crouched in a steel cage, smack in the middle of the African savanna. I squint into the waning darkness of the early African morning and try (in vain) to identify movement from the nearby bushes. The only sound I hear is my heart pounding. My morning began as every other morning had for the past seven months—rising before dawn, choking down some tea and bread before driving out to a nearby escarpment to find a group of baboons that I’d been dutifully collecting behavioral data on for my Ph.D. thesis. But, this morning my routine was interrupted by a primal fear that has surely shaped human survival for millions of years—the urge to flee. Remarkably, I have an option available to none of our hominid ancestors—a steel cage only 10 meters away. I immediately scramble into the cage where I now sit, wishing that my heartbeat wasn’t so loud. I try to reassure myself, “This works with sharks, right?” Then, I hear it again—the low, rhythmic roars of a lion (or, more likely, a lioness) only a stone’s throw away from me.