A 32-year-old wildlife researcher punched a starving lion in the face for saving his life after being attacked while sleeping in his tent in Botswana’s Okavango Delta.
Gotz Neef’s friends threw elephant dung and branches at the predator before hitting it with a piece of tree in a desperate attempt to save his life. The incident took place on December 7 in Botswana’s Okavango Delta.
Fellow researcher Dr Rainer Von Brandis and head ranger Tomalets Setlabosha tried their best to threaten the elderly lion.
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Later, Setlabosha ran it over with his jeep which scared the animal back into the bust, however, Neef suffered 16 puncture wounds from the lion’s fangs, broken bones in his arm and elbow, and deep scratches from its claws, but is now recovering from his wounds at a hospital.
Meanwhile, animal workers decided to put down the elderly lion, who had been kicked out of his pride by younger rivals and left to starve – prompting him to launch the attack on Neef in a desperate final bid for survival.
Recalling the terrifying five-minute attack, Dr Von Brandis, 46, said: ‘I guess I was not a pretty sight in just a T-shirt naked from the waist down and wearing a head torch screaming at this lion who was attacking my friend!’
The married father-of-two from Cape Town is the Research Director of the Wild Bird Trust was on an expedition with his pal Neef and six other researchers in the wilds of Botswana, Dailymail UK reported.
‘Gotz will heal in time and will be back on the team soon and the lion was put out of its misery. This was not normal lion behaviour but it had no other option to try and stay alive’ he said.
The pair were part of an eight-strong team from the Wild Bird Trust that works throughout Southern Africa and were on an expedition in Botswana funded by the US’s National Geographic Society.
They are both Namibian born but have German ancestry and either have or are entitled to German passports and nationality through their parents. They spend much of their time in the wilds of Africa.
Lucky-to-be-alive Neef had sixteen deep and extremely painful fang bites stitched up in his arms, shoulders and head which left him covered in blood and he was also clawed by the lion.
It took the team three hours to cover about 50 miles due to bad condition of roads before getting Neef to a private clinic at 5 am after being attacked at around 01.26 am.
Neef was then flown from Botswana by an air ambulance to the Lady Pohamba Private Hospital in Windhoek, Namibia, where he is being treated for his bite wounds as well as broken bones in his elbow and arm.
Neef has slept out in the wilds of Africa in his two-man tent more than 500 times and has been the subject to lion attention before.
Neef was in the wilds with a team of researchers from the Botswana Wild Bird Trust on an expedition for the National Geographic Society on an ongoing biodiversity monitoring programme in the Okavango Delta.
They were piloting a biological control programmed of the invasive plant Salvinia Molesta known as ‘Kariba Weed’ which infests the area to see if the application of a species of weevil can kill it off.
Dr Von Brandis said that Gotz Neef is in a stable condition and his parents Georg and Martina are with him and the initial assessments are very encouraging and they hope he will be back to work in the New Year.
It is thought lions kill up to 200 people a year in Africa in the wild mainly by old males who can no longer hunt. The victims are rarely tourists or guides or researchers and tend to be local people in remote villages or poachers.
A healthy male lion can run at up to 50mph and weigh 190kg and stand 1.2m tall at the shoulder and are feared throughout Africa except by the Maasai tribe where boys used to have to kill a male lion as a rite of passage.
