A Soft Spot For Wildlife Porn

I watched a python attack and devour an antelope online recently. As the camera pulled away from the antelope’s twitching leg and went in for a close-up of the python’s giant pink maw, two friends walked into my office. I fumbled for the pause icon and sheepishly explained: “Research for a story.”

I’d been busted looking at wildlife porn. But thankfully, I’m not alone in my fascination with animal-on-animal action. The website I was using, Arkive.org, and shows like Animal Planet’s wildly popular (excuse the pun) Meerkat Manor are examples of how reality programming has spilled over into the wild kingdom. For a traveler interested in wildlife encounters, this kind of footage can be a very helpful research tool.

I’d started trolling the internet for video of animals-in-action several months earlier while researching a travel story on a Komodo Dragon safari in Indonesia. The safari promised the chance to pal around with Komodos in a preserve where thousands of them live. At that point, my knowledge of the Komodo consisted of what I’d learned from the 1990 movie The Freshman — i.e. Bert Parks serenading the giant lizard in a party tent with Marlon Brando.

So I called the tour operator to get specifics, and I learned that the Komodo’s diet consists of — but is not limited to — deer and water buffalo. “It’s a little scary because people have had their legs taken off,” I was told. “But if [the dragons] have a full belly you don’t have to worry — you have a guide carrying a long stick.” This seemed… un-reassuring to me.

I decided that I should see the Komodo in action for myself — to the extent that it was possible to do so without buying a $2,000 plane ticket.

An internet search took me directly to Arkive, which is essentially a database of photos and film clips of thousands of species (many of them endangered). The likes of British wildlife filmmaker Sir David Attenborough and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle contribute to the site, which recently agreed to provide pics to Google Earth.

On Arkive, I watched the massive Komodo lizards (ten feet long with a ten-foot tail and the 150-pound heft of an ultimate fighter) slithering on the beach, slowly, then picking up a frightening amount of speed. And I was able to get all my questions about them and their habitat answered.

Do Komodos swim? I wondered. The answer was yes. Do they travel in packs? No, it turned out. Nine different videos convinced me that the tour operator was far less negligent than I’d originally presumed — and I was actually starting to fantasize about making some Komodo friends. (Though not without a stick that would’ve made Don Corleone proud.)

Soon I moved on to other animals. Arkive has them all. I watched a cobra brawling with a monitor lizard (lizard 1, cobra 0), and I developed something of a fetish for pumas. Arkive hooked me up with footage of a puma kitten learning how to hide prey, a puma kitten being born, and a puma kitten being conceived. Spoiler: puma foreplay involves a lot of roaring­­ – and is actually the kind of wildlife porn you won’t want to get caught watching.