REALITY SHOWS regularly feature contestants eating maggots, swimming with snakes, and jumping off cliffs. But none has ended in people tearing one another apart, limb from limb, the victors feasting on the flesh of the losers. This might happen next season but in the meantime, there’s the National Geographic Channel, which delivers what no other reality show can: a contest ending in brutal death.

Sadly the victims aren’t the obnoxious jock or the bubbly bimbo. Rather, they are the buffalo and the antelope. Predators at War (airing this Sunday at 9:00 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel) takes place in South Africa’s Mala Mala game reserve where a severe drought has broken down the territorial boundaries separating some of the fiercest carnivores on Earth, namely, the lion, the leopard, and the hyena. Complicating matters, two “wild cards” have entered the reserve: the cheetah and the African wild dog. By nature, none of these predators are out to eat each other. Instead, they fight over the same sources of food. Viewers are treated to up close shots of this competition–and the gory results, thanks to the incredible footage of Kim Wolhuter, a former ranger who knows no fear (think less Steve Irwin and more Robert Muldoon, the game warden in Jurassic Park played by the late Bob Peck).