How a Filmmaker Elephant-Proofed His Land Rover Defender 110

From the June 2023 Issue of Car and Driver.

Bob Poole is an Emmy Award–winning filmmaker. His sister, Joyce, is one of the world’s leading authorities on African pachyderm behavior. In the Pooles’ 2012 documentary, War Elephants, the siblings visit Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park—once home to a thriving wild-elephant population, now decimated by civil war and poaching. The elephants remaining in the park are often wary of and even violent toward humans. The Pooles recorded their interactions with the herds in hopes of helping the elephants while highlighting the importance of animal conservation. To do this, they needed a vehicle that could get them across the wild terrain and stand up to an aggressive elephant—just in case diplomacy failed.

“Joyce and I concocted this crazy idea not to run away when the elephants were charging and just try to calm them down,” Bob explains. So he built a steel exoskeleton for his Land Rover Defender 110. “I thought it would at least give us some protection if we were wrong and the elephants tried to kill us,” he says. “And ultimately, that happened, and it definitely saved my life.”

“We were always able to fix the Defender because it’s so simple to work on, and parts are easy to find on the continent. That turbo-diesel will run under water, and the Defender is great in the claylike mud in East Africa.” -Bob Poole, Filmmaker

Along with protecting the endoskeletal filmmakers inside the Land Rover, Poole’s custom cage can serve as a mount for all manner of cameras. With it, the Defender [above] became a mobile video rig that opened fantastic new opportunities for capturing animal antics.

Poole’s most recent work can be seen in National Geographic’s Secrets of the Elephants, a four-part documentary by filmmaker James Cameron. All four episodes are available on Disney+.