African Photo Safari: How to Choose a Trip That Actually Produces Great Images

By Craig Howes, Founder & Editor, African Safari Mag. Professional wildlife photographer and filmmaker.

The best wildlife photographs I have taken did not come from the most expensive trips, or the ones with "photographic" in the name. They came from a handful of specific conditions lining up at once: a private reserve with few other vehicles, the freedom to leave the road, the car to myself or shared only with other photographers, a guide who understood light as well as he understood animals, and enough time to sit with a sighting instead of moving on. Get those conditions and the images follow. Miss them and no amount of budget or gear rescues the trip.

The strength of this leopard frame comes from separation, not rarity. Side light catches the face and eyes while the background falls away, a brief alignment of angle, timing and patience. Photo Craig Howes

That is the whole thing most photographic safari advice gets backwards. It leads with the type of trip you should buy. It should lead with the conditions that make great images, and then work out which way of buying a trip actually delivers them for you. Sometimes that is a dedicated photographic operator. Often, for a competent photographer, it is not. This guide is about how to plan an African photo safari that actually delivers those conditions: what produces the images first, then the four different ways to buy a trip, and which one fits the kind of photographer you are.

Planning a photographic safari and not sure which way to build it?

This guide covers the conditions that produce great wildlife images, the four ways to buy a trip, and where each one is worth the money. If you would rather have it worked out for you, Plan Your Safari puts your trip in front of us and we route you to the right fit. Free, no obligation, and we only earn anything if you book.

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What actually makes a great wildlife photograph

Ask most people what makes a safari good for photography and they will say the destination, or the season, or the camera. Those matter, but they are downstream of something simpler. Across every trip I have shot, the images that were worth keeping came from the same five conditions. When I plan a trip now, wildlife photography or not, these are what I am really buying.

Few guests, and few vehicles. 

The single biggest difference between a frustrating photographic day and a great one is how many other cars are at the sighting. In a busy public park you can arrive at a leopard and find eight vehicles already there, jockeying for the gap, engines running, and the light going while you wait your turn. On a private reserve or a conservancy with low vehicle density, it is often just you. That changes everything about what you can shoot and how calmly you can shoot it.

Low vehicle density does not mean an empty reserve. It means sightings are managed well enough for vehicles to keep their distance, avoid blocking one another and give guests a clear photographic angle.

The freedom to leave the road. 

This is the one condition that draws the hardest line between the public parks and the private reserves, and it is worth understanding before you book anything. In Kruger and most national parks, you must stay on the designated roads. That is the rule, and off-road driving is a serious offence, not a grey area. It exists for good reasons, but it caps what you can do photographically: you shoot from where the road happens to be, at whatever angle that gives you. On a private reserve, guides can take the vehicle off-road and position you. The difference is the difference between photographing a lion where you found it and photographing a lion with the morning sun behind you and a clean background, because the guide moved you two metres to make it work.

I learned this properly early on. On one of my first trips to MalaMala, when I had seen leopard before but rarely and never up close, the tracker picked up fresh leopard tracks and we went off-road to follow them. Tucked away in the bush was a leopard and her cub with a kill, and we sat about ten metres from them. I had packed a 60-600mm expecting to reach for everything, and instead shot almost the entire sighting on a Sony 200mm f2.8. That lens choice is the whole point: on a public road I would have needed the long end just to get near, but off-road in a private reserve I was close enough that the 200mm gave me beautiful, clean frames. And because no other vehicles were waiting, we stayed as long as we wanted. It was quiet, it was intimate, and it is still one of the sightings that taught me what these conditions are actually worth.

The vehicle to yourself, or shared with other photographers. 

A great sighting shared with a family who want to see the animal, take a phone snap, and move on is a different vehicle from one where everyone wants to wait for the light. Neither is wrong, but they are not the same trip. What you want, as a photographer, is either a private vehicle or a car where every seat is a photographer working to the same rhythm: staying longer, staying quiet, waiting for the behaviour. You do not need a photographic operator to get this. A good lodge will sell you a private vehicle, and a good planner will build that into the trip.

The best game drive of my life happened because of this exact thing. On a trip to the Okavango Delta I had my own vehicle and my own guide, a man called Lasty who understood light and animal behaviour as well as anyone I have shot with. It started slowly.

Wild dogs move too quickly for a photographer to control the scene once the pack commits. The advantage of time and a private vehicle is being able to stay with the behaviour long enough for a coherent frame to emerge. Photo Craig Howes

We found two wild dogs, and the other vehicle, wanting to move on and find other things, left for breakfast. I love wild dogs, so we stayed. After about half an hour those two led us back to the whole pack. We waited another fifteen minutes until they got up to hunt, and then Lasty asked if I wanted to follow, warning me it would be rough. It was a very bumpy ride. We drove behind them at a respectful distance and watched them take down a young impala, and because it was just me in the car, we could stay. We watched the pack after the kill, the young ones playing, then followed them into a second hunt and a second kill, and got back to the lodge around midday, hours after everyone else had finished breakfast. On a normal game drive I have been at sightings exactly like that and had to leave, because there were other guests in the car who wanted to move on. The private vehicle and a guide who reads animals are the only reason I got that day instead of a photograph of two dogs and a story about the ones that got away.

A guide who reads light. 

The best guides know where the leopard is likely to be at four in the afternoon. A guide who is also thinking photographically knows where to put the vehicle so that leopard is lit, and knows to hold position because the animal is about to stand. That second layer of thinking is not universal. It is standard on a photographer-led trip, common at the better lodges, and absent when you are driving yourself. It is one of the quiet reasons a self-drive, for all its freedom, rarely produces a photographer's best work.

A guide who reads light can see the photograph before an animal enters it. In this kind of late-afternoon light, positioning and patience matter as much as the eventual subject.

Time. 

Great wildlife images are usually a function of waiting. Sitting with a sighting long enough for the animal to do something, for the light to change, for the moment to arrive. On a self-drive you control your own time completely. On every other kind of trip, how much time you get at a sighting is set by the guide and by the other people in the car. It is worth asking about before you book, because a lodge that rushes you back for lunch is a lodge that will cost you images.

Hold those five in your head, because they are the test. Every way of buying a photographic safari below is really just a different mechanism for getting some or all of them. The question is never "which is the best photographic operator." It is "which of these gets me the conditions I need, for the kind of photographer I am."

The four ways to buy a photographic safari

There are four broadly different ways to buy a trip built for photography, and they are not the neat separate boxes they first appear to be. The best named photographers often sell more than one of them. But as a way of working out what you actually need, the four hold up well.

How you buy it	Photographer embedded?	Photo infrastructure (hides, boats, modified vehicles)	Tuition	Flexibility	Indicative cost
Dedicated photo operator	Yes, a photo host	Yes, the operator's own kit	Built in	Fixed itineraries, set departures	~USD 2,500 (short package) to USD 15,000+ (two-week trip)
Private photographer-guide	Yes, travels with you	Via the camps and hides they book	Personal, in the vehicle	High, built around you	Mostly quote-based
Planner-built photo trip	No, but guides chosen for photographic understanding	Via lodge choice (private vehicle, resident hides)	No	Highest, fully bespoke	Priced as the equivalent luxury safari, no photo markup
Photo-friendly lodge on a standard trip	Optional host, often on request	Lodge's own (hide, rental gear), sometimes room-gated	On request	Normal safari flexibility	Standard lodge rates

The table is the shape of the decision. The detail underneath each one is where the real differences live.

1. A dedicated photographic safari operator

This is a company built entirely around wildlife photography. The vehicles are modified for it (bean-bag mounts, camera bars, low sides, swivel seats), the group sizes are small and capped by photographers per vehicle rather than beds, and there is usually a professional photographer hosting who handles both the guiding rhythm and in-field tuition. Some run their own specialised kit you cannot get any other way: floating hides, purpose-built photographic boats, sunken waterhole hides at eye level with the animals.

On foot, photography comes second to the guide’s reading of wind, distance and animal behaviour. The lower viewpoint can be valuable, but it is only appropriate under professional guidance and where conditions are considered safe.

Best for: photographers who want the infrastructure, the tuition, or the specialised kit, and who are happy to travel on the operator's schedule with other photographers. Also the right answer if you specifically want to learn. We keep an independent view of the photographic safari companies worth considering.

Trade-offs: you travel to a fixed itinerary with a set group, and you pay for the specialisation. A non-photographing partner may find it a lot of photography. Some operators publish prices openly; others are quote-only, which makes comparison harder.

Roughly: dedicated hosted departures run a wide range depending on length, destinations, and camp tier. At the accessible end, a short three-to-four-day package built around a single area (a Chobe photo hotel, say) starts around USD 2,500 per person. Longer multi-country hosted itineraries of two weeks or so reach USD 15,000 to 16,000 per person, and the most ambitious multi-week trips go beyond that.

2. A private photographer as your guide

Here a named professional photographer travels with you, either on a small scheduled departure or a fully private trip they design around you. You are buying that person's eye and their access. The difference from the first model is that the photographer is embedded in your specific trip rather than hosting at a fixed camp, and the difference from a planner is that the photographer is physically there, in the vehicle, working the sightings with you.

Black and white works when colour is not carrying the story. Here, skin texture, shadow and the overlap between two elephants create the depth of the image.

This is also where the most underrated part of a photographic trip lives, and it is worth being clear about what it actually adds. A great local guide knows the animals: where the leopard rests, when the wild dogs move, how the herd will run. A photographer-guide does not replace that knowledge. They translate it. The local guide says the leopard is in that drainage line; the photographer says let's get the vehicle on the far side so the light's behind us, and let's wait, he's about to come down. The local guide knows the leopard. The photographer knows the picture. On a trip where the local guiding is already excellent, that translation layer is often what turns good sightings into great frames.

Best for: photographers who want a named eye and personal tuition, or who are building a serious portfolio and want someone who thinks the way they do in the car. Works for a couple where one shoots, if the photographer runs it that way.

Trade-offs: you are relying heavily on one person, so the fit matters. Pricing is frequently quote-based rather than a published rate, because these trips are built around you.

3. A photo-focused trip built by a good planner

This is the one most competent photographers actually need, and it is the one the market talks about least, because there is no photographic brand attached to it. It is a normal high-end safari, engineered specifically for photography: the right reserves for low vehicle density and off-road access, the right season, a private vehicle, lodges with guides known for photographic understanding, and enough time at each place to shoot properly. A good safari planner assembles all of that without the trip ever being a "photographic safari" in name.

The wider frame matters. Keeping the water, grass and rocky woodland around these elephants shows how they use the landscape instead of reducing the scene to two large animals. Photo Craig Howes

Here is the honest version of my own view, and it is worth saying plainly because it is easy to assume you need a specialist product when you do not. If you already know your camera, and what you want is the conditions rather than a workshop, you do not need a trip with "photographic" on the label. You need the right reserve, the right season, few guests, off-road, a private vehicle, and a light-literate guide. That is a planning problem, and a good planner solves it. It is how most of my own best images have happened.

Best for: competent photographers who want the conditions, not the classroom, and who value flexibility, a bespoke route, and a trip that also works for a travelling partner.

Trade-offs: the photographic thinking depends on choosing the right lodges and guides, so the planner has to actually understand what makes a place work photographically, not just book a nice lodge. That matching is exactly what our planning service is built to do.

Roughly: this is priced like an equivalent-tier luxury safari rather than at a specialist premium, which is part of the point. What you spend depends on the reserves and lodges, not on a photographic markup.

4. Photo-friendly lodges on a standard trip

The lightest-touch option. You book an ordinary safari, but at lodges that happen to be good for photography: a resident photographic host available on request, a hide on the property, a private photographic vehicle you can add, camera rental if you travel light. You get better photographic conditions than a standard trip without committing to a photography-only holiday.

A photo-friendly lodge can keep producing opportunities after the vehicle is parked. Open views, waterholes and patient observation from camp often create quieter images than another hurried game drive.

Best for: the serious hobbyist who wants strong images but also wants a normal safari, and travelling companions who are not photographers.

Trade-offs: the photographic features are usually optional extras and sometimes gated to certain rooms or rates, so a lodge with a "photographic safari" page is not the same as a dedicated operator. Read what is actually included before you assume it is built in.

Where you go changes what you can shoot

The right destination for a photographic safari depends on what you want to photograph and how you want to work, more than on any ranking of "best" countries. The differences that matter to a photographer are route freedom, how close you can get, whether water is part of the picture, and how managed the crowding is. Here is the shape of it, then the detail.

Region	Signature images	Off-road?	The photographic edge
Sabi Sands / Greater Kruger, South Africa	Close-range predators, leopard especially	Yes (private reserves; not in public Kruger)	Off-road positioning and world-class leopard viewing
Okavango & Chobe, Botswana	Water-level wildlife, floodplain atmosphere, wild dogs	Varies by concession	Boat-based shooting and water in the frame
Maasai Mara, Kenya	Open-plains predators, the migration	In the conservancies; not the main reserve	Big-sky action; experience varies sharply by management
Serengeti, Tanzania	Migration at scale, landscapes with space	Varies by area; check the rules for where you stay	Sheer scale
Etosha, Namibia	Waterhole gatherings, stark dry-season scenes	No, roads only	Predictable waterholes, some floodlit at night
South Luangwa, Zambia	Walking-safari perspectives, river and lagoon life	Guided walking is the point	On foot, at eye level

South Africa: Sabi Sands and the Greater Kruger. 

This is the strongest region in Africa for close, off-road predator work, and the reason is the private reserves. In the Sabi Sands, guides can go off-road and position you, and the leopard viewing in particular is among the best anywhere. The public Kruger next door shares the same wildlife and the same ecosystem, but you are on the roads, which caps your angles. If close, well-lit predator images are the goal, this is where I would start, and it is the ground I know best. For the fuller picture of the country beyond photography, our South Africa safari guide covers it.

This is home for me, and I am biased about it for a reason. I live in Cape Town now, but I grew up going to Kruger, and I still love going back: the wildlife is spectacular, and one of my favourite landscapes to shoot, the Blyde River Canyon, is a short drive from the bushveld. What still gets me is the range inside one country. Cape Town itself is an extraordinary place for photography, with the kind of coastal light and dream sunrises and sunsets every photographer wants, and then a two-hour flight puts you in the Lowveld among leopards. Being in a city like Cape Town one week and in Kruger the next, and realising it is all the same country, is a big part of what makes South Africa such a rewarding place to build a photographic trip around.

Botswana: the Okavango and the Chobe. 

Botswana is where water becomes part of the photograph. In the Chobe you can shoot from a boat, low and level with elephants and hippos at the waterline, an angle you simply cannot get from a vehicle. The Okavango's floodwaters (fed by rain in the Angolan highlands, spreading through the Delta from around March and typically peaking in the dry winter months) create reflections, channels, and dry-season concentrations of wildlife around water. The Delta is also, in my experience, some of the best wild dog country on the continent, and predators here move across water and floodplain in a way that gives you images you will not get in the drier reserves. If you want atmosphere, water, and a different eye-level, Botswana is the answer.

Kenya: the Maasai Mara. 

The Mara is open-plains predator country and the stage for the great migration, which means sweeping wide-angle images and dramatic predator-prey action. One thing worth knowing before you book: the experience varies a lot by how the land is managed. The Mara Triangle enforces published rules that limit crowding at sightings, including a ten-minute viewing limit when more than five vehicles are queuing, with waiting vehicles held 100 metres back. The private conservancies bordering the reserve typically cap vehicle numbers at sightings too, and allow off-road driving, which the main reserve does not. "The Mara" is not one experience. Where you stay decides how many other cars are in your frame.

Tanzania: the Serengeti. 

The Serengeti's photographic case is scale and the migration's geography. Over a million wildebeest moving across a landscape big enough to hold them, with the southern plains, the western corridor, and the north behaving as different seasonal chapters. It is the country for images that need space in them. [CRAIG: TANAPA off-road rules were not confirmed in research; do not state Serengeti off-road practice as fact until verified.]

Namibia: Etosha. 

Etosha is dry-season, waterhole photography. The animals come to the water because they have to, and you position yourself and wait. Several of the park's camps have floodlit waterholes that stay productive into the night. It is a more static, more patient kind of shooting than the private reserves, and in the long dry season it delivers.

Zambia: South Luangwa. 

Luangwa is the home of the walking safari, and its photographic character is different again: river-and-lagoon habitat, high concentrations of game, exceptional birdlife, and a way of being on foot and at eye level that the vehicle-bound reserves cannot offer. It rewards a photographer who wants something other than the classic open-vehicle savanna image.

When to go

Season shapes a photographic trip as much as place.

The simple version, which holds across most of these regions:

The dry season (broadly the middle of the year, roughly June to October in Southern and East Africa) is the classic wildlife-photography window. Thinning vegetation and animals concentrating around shrinking water make sightings more frequent and cleaner, and the light is reliable. This is when most people shoot, and for good reason.

The green season (the wet months, broadly November to May) is the photographer's contrarian season, and the one I argue for most often. I was in the Okavango in December and it was one of my favourite trips: deep green landscapes not yet overgrown, dramatic storm skies, newborn animals everywhere, and some of the best birding I have had. It was hot, that is the honest trade-off, but the heat came with extraordinary sightings, including the wild dog day I described earlier. The catch is that wildlife disperses when water is everywhere, so some things take more work to find. For atmosphere, drama, young animals, and space to yourself, it is often the better trip.

Green season is not simply the same safari with greener backgrounds. Young animals, softer vegetation and more social behaviour change the photographs available, even when wildlife is less concentrated and takes more work to find.

That dispersal is worth understanding, because it cuts differently for different animals. I was in the same part of the Delta a month apart. In November I saw wild dogs once, for about twenty seconds. In December we saw them every day. Elephants went the other way: plenty of them in the drier weeks, then sparse once the rains spread water across the system and they no longer had to gather at the shrinking waterholes. More water disperses the animals that depend on it and makes them unpredictable. Less water concentrates them and makes them easier to find. On that same December trip there was so much happening that the other vehicle alone watched a baboon carry a young impala into a tree, and another morning a kudu drive jackals off an impala mother and her calf. Green season, prey dropping young, and the whole food web switched on.

Migration crossings, predator action, waterhole concentrations, and green-season birds all peak at different times. Matching season to subject is exactly what a good planner does.

If you are chasing kills and action

If you are a repeat safari-goer or a photographer specifically after predation and action, one pattern is worth knowing, with a caveat. Kills are easiest to photograph when conditions either concentrate predators or weaken prey. Green-season floodplains are one version, which is part of why the December Delta delivered. Drought is another, harder one. On one of my trips to the Sabi Sands during a drought, a pride was taking down buffalo almost every day, because the prey was weak and other food was scarce, and the guide told us it had been going on for weeks. It made for extraordinary images. But drought is rare and impossible to plan around, so understand it rather than try to book it. What you can plan is season and place, and green-season concentrations plus dry-season waterholes are where the odds tilt your way.

What a "photographic vehicle" and a "hide" actually mean

Two terms get used loosely in this market, and it helps to know what you are actually being offered.

A photographic vehicle is not just an open safari car. At the serious end it means: bean-bag mounts or camera bars to steady long lenses, seats that swivel and sometimes rotate a full 360 degrees, sides low enough to shoot down toward eye level with the animals, a limit of only a few photographers so everyone has a clear side and no one is shooting over a shoulder, and sometimes a dropped floor or a boat hull that puts you low to the water. When a dedicated operator talks about its vehicles, this is the kind of thing it means, and it is a genuine difference. When a general lodge offers a "photographic vehicle," ask specifically what is modified, because sometimes it is a private car with a bean bag, which is useful but not the same.

A hide is a concealed position that lets you photograph animals at eye level without them reacting to you. Some are sunken at a waterhole so your lens is at ground level as animals drink. Some are floating on a delta channel. Some are built for a specific subject, like a leopard hide or a bird hide. The best ones I have sat in were at Makumu and Mhondoro, both sunken bunkers at the waterline where you shoot at eye level as the animals come down to drink, and both finished to the point of having a mini bar, a fridge, and a coffee machine. After a run of game drives, there is a lot to be said for sitting in a quiet bunker with a coffee, letting the wildlife come to you, and getting a perspective on the same animals that a vehicle can never give you. Hides produce a particular kind of intimate, low-angle image, and access to a good one is one of the real reasons to choose a dedicated operator or a lodge that has built its own.

A hide changes more than distance. At Mhondoro, shooting near water level turns the zebra’s reflection into part of the subject and removes the downward angle that usually comes with photographing from a vehicle. Photo Craig Howes

What a photographic safari costs

Photographic safari pricing is genuinely hard to pin down, partly because the products are so different and partly because a lot of operators quote per trip rather than publishing a rate. So treat these as orientation, not quotes, and confirm current figures directly.

As a rough shape: dedicated hosted photographic departures currently span from around USD 2,500 per person for a short three-to-four-day package built on a single area, up to USD 15,000 to 16,000 per person for a two-week multi-country itinerary, with the most ambitious multi-week trips running higher still. On the serious trips, that tends to work out somewhere in the low thousands of US dollars per person per day, and the figure climbs with the exclusivity of the camps. A trip built by a planner is priced like the equivalent luxury safari it is, driven by the reserves and lodges you choose rather than by a photographic markup, which is one of the arguments for that route if you already have the skills.

The more useful thing to understand than any single number is what moves the price: the exclusivity of the reserve, the tier of the lodges, whether you take a private vehicle, how remote the camps are (some need internal charter flights), and how long you go. Those levers, not a photographic premium, are what mostly decide the cost.

Common questions

Which African country is best for a photo safari?

There is no single best, because it depends on what you want to shoot. For close, off-road predator images, South Africa's private reserves (the Sabi Sands especially) are hard to beat. For water-level and atmosphere, Botswana's Okavango and Chobe. For open-plains action and the migration, Kenya's Maasai Mara and Tanzania's Serengeti. For waterhole photography, Namibia's Etosha. For walking and river habitat, Zambia's South Luangwa. The right choice is the one that matches your subject and the way you like to work.

How much does an African photo safari cost?

It varies widely by how you buy it. Dedicated hosted photographic trips currently range from around USD 2,500 per person for a short package built on a single area to about USD 15,000 to 16,000 per person for a two-week multi-country itinerary, with the most ambitious trips running higher. A trip built by a planner is priced like the equivalent luxury safari, so the reserves and lodges you choose drive the cost more than any photographic premium. Confirm current pricing directly with operators, as it updates annually.

What is the best month for an African photo safari?

The dry season (roughly June to October in most regions) is the classic window for frequent, clean sightings and reliable light. The green season (roughly November to May) trades sighting frequency for dramatic landscapes, newborn animals, exceptional birdlife, and far fewer vehicles. The best month for you depends on your subject, since migration crossings, predator action, and green-season birds all peak at different times.

Which company is best for an African photo safari?

It depends which of the four ways of buying suits you. If you want the specialised kit, tuition, or a photography-only trip, a dedicated photographic operator makes sense. If you want the right conditions without a workshop, a planner-built trip is often the better and more flexible answer. We keep an editorially independent view of the operators worth considering, and if you would rather have it matched to your trip, that is what our planning service does.

Why can't you wear white on safari?

Because it stands out. Bright white (and to a lesser extent black) is more visible to wildlife and shows dust and dirt badly. Neutral, muted colours (khaki, olive, brown, grey) help you blend into the environment, which matters more the closer you are working and especially on walking safaris and in hides. It is a small thing that makes a real difference to how close you can get.

Deciding which way to go

If you take one thing from this, let it be the order of the questions. Not "which is the best photographic operator," but "which conditions do I need, and which way of buying gets me there." A photographer who wants to learn, or who wants specialised hides and boats, should look hard at a dedicated operator. A photographer who already knows their camera and wants the conditions (few guests, off-road, a private vehicle, a guide who reads light, and time) usually needs a well-built trip more than a branded one, and that is a planning problem a good planner solves.

A photographic safari does not need to revolve around close predator sightings. In the desert, small subjects, dune contours and tracks can produce a more graphic image where landscape carries as much weight as wildlife. Image courtesy of ORYX Photo Tours.

Not sure which way is right for your trip? Tell us what you want to photograph, how you like to work, and roughly when and how long you have. We will point you to the way of buying that fits, and route you to a planner or operator who can build it. It is what Plan Your Safari is for. Free, no obligation, and we only earn anything if you go ahead and book.

About the author

Craig Howes is a professional wildlife photographer, filmmaker, and the founder and editor of African Safari Mag. Named Safari Influencer of the Year in 2020, he grew up on the western edge of the Greater Kruger and has spent years photographing across Southern and East Africa, including the Sabi Sands, MalaMala, the Okavango Delta, the Chobe, the Maasai Mara, and Namibia. Every recommendation on this page is drawn from that fieldwork. African Safari Mag is an independent editorial guide to African safari travel: operators and lodges are vetted on merit, and no one can pay to be recommended. More about how we work.

Craig Howes on safari as an elephant drinks from the far end of a lodge pool. Moments like this are a reminder that a safari lodge sits inside wildlife habitat. The animal sets the distance and pace of the encounter.