Scent of a Rival (13-minute Video)
On an ordinary day in a Botswana wildlife reserve in 2015, a camera trap caught a leopard doing something extraordinary. She was moving along a track she knew well. Nothing stood in her way.
No dogs. No electric fences. No one with a rifle. And then she stopped, turned, and walked back the way she had come.
Across southern Africa, a farmer who loses livestock to leopards has one reliable answer: a dead leopard.
Chemist Peter Apps is building another one. By identifying a single compound that leopards produce and almost nothing else does, he can forge a message a leopard cannot ignore: that a bigger, more dangerous rival already holds this ground.
Worn on a collar around a goat's neck, it keeps the predator away, and keeps both alive. This is the story of how that message was found, why an animal cannot learn to ignore it.
