In Botswana, conservation biologists spent years painting enormous fake eyes onto the backsides of over two thousand cattle, betting on a simple piece of predator psychology — that a lion who thinks i

A Botswana conservation project discovered that painting fake eyes on cattle backsides stopped predators cold, suggesting that lions abandon hunts when they believe they've been spotted.

Out on the fringes of the Okavango Delta, several hundred cattle once wandered around with enormous eyes painted on their backsides, and not one of them got eaten by a lion.

That is a literal accounting, not a gag. Across four field seasons between 2015 and 2018, a team near the village of Shorobe in northern Botswana painted 683 cattle with big two-tone eyespots on the rump, gave 543 more a simple cross, and left 835 alone. Lions and leopards killed 15 of the unmarked animals and four of the cross-marked ones. Eyespot cattle killed: none. Cameron Radford, Neil Jordan and their colleagues published the tally in Communications Biology , and it remains one of the stranger results in livestock protection.