Exploring Kruger National Park: Lions, Wild Animals, & Documentary - Essay Sample

Introduction

Late last year, a friend of the family and his team flew to South Africa to make a documentary about the wild animals of the Kruger National Park. Kruger National Park is one of the popular national parks where tourists, scientists, and moviemakers can visit and shoot their films. Early this year, he arrived with a mountain of hours of unedited film that I was able to go through in a couple of days. Most of my family members were interested in the lions due to their ability to dominate the savannah since they are the top predators. However, my interest lay in the life of a certain large pack of baboons. Those four days were one of the most informative days of my life not only regarding life in the world but some vital life lessons on a personal and societal level. In the course of the four days of binge-watching the documentary, I learned a plethora of lessons that include the need for law and order in a society, why we need to learn to live with neighbors of different backgrounds, and how power is maintained.

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From the onset, one has to understand that watching a documentary film is like watching life unfolding with all its beauties and faults unlike in the Hollywood films where an agenda is set before the onset of the film. As a result, my experience was heightened by the fact that what I was watching was real and this deeply fascinated me. The first lesson that I observed in this experience was that law and order are critical in every society and failure to observe it often has serious ramifications- in nature, the lessons can mean life or death. In the film, three young male baboons try to overthrow the reigning male for days and this brings disorder to the pack.

The leading male manages to find support from an older male baboon and together they form a formidable alliance against the young males. By the third day, the fighting is so bad that it continues into the night and the baboons are unable to reach the safety of the rocks for the night and decide to rest on the foot of some huge boulders. However, unlike the lions and the leopards, the baboons do not see well at night and they are attacked by a resident lion pride. A total of five baboons die. This was an essential lesson because it dawned on me that when there is a breakdown in law and order, it is the members of that society that suffer.

Another of the essential problems that I leaned from the interaction with this pack of baboons is that we need to learn to live with our neighbors. One of the reasons why I was interested in the baboons is that they live in a complex society just like humans. Today, the human race is facing a lot of challenges chief among them international terrorism and climate change and global warming. However, rather than fight these problems together, each state, neighborhood, and household prefers to live in isolation. Unlike the human race, baboons in this park have learned to live together with other grazing animals such as antelopes and buffaloes and share security duties.

One of the dangerous activities for the grazing herbivores comes during drinking time because they have to come out of the shelter of the bushes into the rivers. What the baboons and the antelopes do is to take turns to have sentries on the watch when they are on the banks of the river. With the slightest sign of danger, the sentries sent out a warning and the pack of animals along the river bank scatters. Due to their ability to climb trees, the baboons have the best sentries and are, therefore, tolerated by the herbivores despite their playfulness. If people can learn to tolerate and perhaps live in harmony alongside one another, it is possible that the problems that are facing the human race can be defeated.

Lastly, a got a lesson in leadership- leadership is maintained by the use of force or the threat of violence. Now and again, world leaders come on TV and threaten one another and people across the globe are quick to criticize them. However, from days of observing the baboons, it dawned on me that power is gained and maintained by force and the person who can use violence or threat of violence the best gets to stay in power for long. In this pack, the alpha male would not shy away from attacking the young males as a way of reminding them of their position in the chain of command.

It, therefore, occurred to me that the recent bad blood between Iran and the US is just a way of demonstrating power by each country and is likely to continue being so for a very long time. Hence, the baboons of the wild taught me vital life lessons about the need for law and order in society, the need to live in harmony with neighbors from different backgrounds and how power is attained and maintained in society.