Audiences got an antelope’s eye view.
A lioness in South Africa greeted wildlife fans to a terrifying selfie after biting down on a GoPro camera, inadvertently filming the interior of its mouth for all to see. The up-close and personal footage is currently blowing up online.
“I tried to anticipate the movements of the lions and got really lucky with a curious female,” photographer Frank de Beer told Caters News Agency of the acci-dental video, which was filmed in Balule Nature Reserve on Feb. 7.
The fotog reportedly got the jaw-some shot by leaving the video camera on a dirt path frequented by lions in an effort to get one of the big cats to pick it up in its maw.
“It was planned, but the animals still had the choice to avoid the camera or just walk around it,” explained the hopeful photographer of the feline dental exam.
Luckily for him, Nala decided to bite, providing viewers a prey’s-eye view of what it might look like to be chomped by a lion — sans the battle scars.
The resulting 2-minute, POV footage begins with the inquisitive lioness approaching and then mouthing the GoPro. After several exploratory nips, the ferocious feline lifts the recording device up in her zebra-cruncher so audiences can see her massive incisors and tongue in excruciating detail.
Thankfully, despite its intra-oral adventure, the “camera was perfectly fine, thanks to its protective case,” de Beer said.
This isn’t the first time the wildlife enthusiast has gotten an “inside” look at big game via a cleverly planted camera. He tried the same trick with elephants in South Africa’s Hoedspruit, Limpopo, in 2017, and captured one of the pachyderms inspecting the GoPro with its trunk, Caters reported.
In perhaps the most famous wildlife selfie incident to date, an Indonesian crested macaque monkey named Naruto used a photographer’s camera to snap a series of now-viral self-portraits. This sparked a major copyright lawsuit with the judge eventually ruling that the monkey couldn’t be declared the rightful owner of the photos.
