The Five Musketeers are some of Africa’s most threatened hunters.
They’re not humans: They’re lions. The five male cats have touched lives beyond the desert in which they roam. “King of the Desert Lions,” premiering Wednesday on the Smithsonian Channel, tells their triumphant — and riveting — story. Produced and directed by Will and Lianne Steenkamp, it’s the result of nearly six years of filming in the inhospitable desert. The film’s spectacular visuals weave a story of a lion family that’s up against some serious odds.
The terrain of the Namib Desert, which is nearly rainless, is a challenging environment for any animal. The rare desert-adapted lions, among just a handful of their kind, must figure out how to feed themselves and navigate encounters with other animals — including the humans with whom they struggle to coexist.
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The movie is filled with stunning landscapes, and the sleek lions are part of an arid but beautiful terrain that both sustains and threatens. The members of the pack work together — until they don’t, in an incident that turned the lions into national figures in Namibia.
That event, and a more recent one affecting one of the brothers, ended up changing how the country approaches human-lion interactions. Philip Stander, a scientist featured in the documentary, led an effort to protect the area’s few remaining big cats.
“King of the Desert Lions” is a sobering reminder that no matter how majestic they are, endangered animals’ scariest predators are often humans, who can change the landscape in an instant — reducing a pride of five to a single “king.”
