Anne Hilborn is a scientist at the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Virginia Tech. She researches cheetah hunting behaviour in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.
One morning she was driving around Serengeti looking for cheetahs, when she came across two hyenas having sex.
I was tootling around #serengeti trying to find cheetahs, when I came upon two hyenas #mammalwatching #HyenaSexFail
Everyone knows sex can be a complete and utter disappointment – and it turns out that is true for hyenas too. Like when he thinks he's in...
The male obviously thought he was in and quite proud of it #mammalwatching #HyenaSexFail #serengeti
... but he's totally missed the mark, and it's actually between your thighs.
However it was obvious that he was missing the target completely despite her help #mammalwatching #HyenaSexFail
Hilborn had never seen mating hyenas before. So she took lots of pictures of this hyena sex catastrophe and tweeted it.
Things just got sadder after that #mammalwatching #HyenaSexFail #serengeti
“Thankfully, the event was full of drama,” she told BuzzFeed. "The facial expressions on the male hyena were priceless."
Many males would have given up after a fail like that, but not this guy. He was made of sterner, if not stiffer stuff
The male hyena tried to seduce his way out of the embarrassing sexual situation.
To regain the female's interest he went with the seduction method of back-licking #mammalwatching #HyenaSexFail
He tried all the tricks in the book, from nibbling to licking.
Encouraged by her willingness, he graduated to back nibbling #mammalwatching #HyenaSexFail #serengeti
No matter how hard he thrusted, the female hyena was just not into it.
However despite many thrusts he still was badly off target #mammalwatching #serengeti
Changing position slightly was not working either.
Letting his butt sag to the ground was no helping his aim. At all. #mammalwatching #serengeti
Reaching an orgasm was not going to happen for either hyena, so sensibly they called it a night.
Disheartened by his double failure, he slid off in defeat #mammalwatching #hyenasexfail #serengeti
Was he bad at sex or just having an off day? Either way, we've all been there, hyena.
There are so many possible captions to this photo of the male after his #HyenaSexFail #mammalwatching