The Persistence Hunt: Bushmen run a kudu to death

During his first full-throttle “persistence hunt,” the South African biologist Louis Liebenberg was working with bushmen in the Kalahari Desert in the early 1990s. He accompanied a hunting party armed with handmade bows and arrows. The hunters stalked kudu — a nimble antelope, slightly smaller than an elk. When a young stag split off from the herd, the bushmen ran flat-out after it.

The kudu moved quickly out of sight in the brushy Kalahari landscape. But keeping up was more than just a matter of running; the hunters also needed to pick up footprints in the sand on the fly. Liebenberg, then age 30, hadn’t done the conditioning to be a long-distance runner, and he was wearing heavy leather boots as a precaution against poisonous snakes. And this was shaping up to be a hard run.

In persistence hunting, the trick is to trot almost nonstop in the heat of the midday sun, pushing the animal along so that it never has time to recover in the shade of an acacia tree. The Kalahari hunters have figured out how to play one critical advantage in a deadly game that pitches their survival against that of animals: Humans have an evaporative cooling system, in the form of sweat; antelope don’t. When conditions are right, a man can run even the fastest antelope on earth to death by overheating.