So what's your background? What brings you to Zimbabwe, and what makes you interested in painted dogs?

I don't have a traditional science-led background whatsoever.

My schooling, education, high, you know, higher education was all in kind of management, uh, situations.

Nothing to do with science, but always, m- like yourself, from a very young age, interest and passion for wildlife and conservation.

A very early childhood memory of mine was, or is watching a documentary called Solo, which was filmed in the Serengeti by the late Jane Goodall and her late husband, Hugo van Lawick.

And that actually also is a story about a beta female-

Is this a model that you think could be rolled out there to, to protect that incredibly rare soon-to-be subspecies of dogs?

Yeah, it, very much so, and it's an area that I'm, think, working on in- increasingly.