WARNING: SOME IMAGES AND VIDEOS MAY HURT THE READER'S SENSITIVITY.
Sawubona adventurers!, today in this blog post I want to restore the image of an animal which is considered powerful, strong and brave, but at the same time is branded as lazy within its species, claiming that those who go hunting are the females and that the male lions only sleep and steal the prey from the lionesses. Nothing could be further from the truth, the life of a male lion is full of danger, misfortune and often early death... I am going to divide his life into stages to explain his social life, behaviour and possible experiences.
Stage 1, from 0 months of age to 12 months of age:
During their time as cubs, the male lion is no different from it sisters in terms of breeding, he will suckle from his mother or aunts and will put his predatory skills into practice by playing with the rest of the litter. From 6/7 months onwards, they will leave their mother's milk behind and only feed on the prey that the pride gets. I have to add that at this stage whether they are female or male there is a very high mortality rate, it can be due to famine (lack of prey), disease, other predators (sometimes the cubs can be left alone for up to 24 hours while the pride searches for prey), or even other male lions if there is a new leader in the herd.
Stage 2, from one year of age to 2 years of age:
This stage is still within the pride but it gets more serious as they start to participate in hunts and polish their skills to survive in the wild. Here too, the young lions often create strong bonds with their brothers or cousins, this will help them in the future as they will not wander off alone, this lion twinning is called a coalition. It is at the end of this stage that their pride will start to reject them, not letting them eat the hunted prey, even receiving attacks from both the females and the leader of the pride, i.e. their father. Hopefully, as there are more males of his age he will not be alone and with his coalition they will wander into unknown lands.
Stage 3, from 2 years to 4/5 years:
This is where we will find more deaths for the males, being young with little experience and crossing others pride´s territories with fully developed males can be very dangerous, fights that can cause fatal injuries or death. Also during this stage lonely young lions may join already formed coalitions of other young lions. When they reach the age of 4/5, they are fully developed lions, both physically and sexually, and it will urge them the need to go into established pride territories to challenge the male or males that reign there. This need to establish themselves as pride leaders can be successful, if they manage to overthrow an alpha male or males, but it can also go wrong and die in the attempt, as these confrontations are deadly, only being avoided if one of the two sides is outnumbered and manages to flee.
Stage 4, from 4/5 years old to 9/10 years old:
If the male lion manages to reach this stage, he has almost certainly established himself as a leader of a pride. Unfortunately, his first task is to kill all the cubs up to about a year old. His task is to continue with the continuity of his genes and generate as many cubs as he can, then by killing these cubs the females will go into heat and be able to do his job. From now on his duty as an alpha male, is to look after the new generations, this involves establishing a territory large enough to supply for preys, looking after the limits of this from other males or other predators and providing food for the family when they are with the females. It is well known that when the males are present in the pride while hunting is when they can take down much larger prey, such as buffalo, giraffes, hippopotamus or even young elephants. Unfortunately, the male lion doesn´t reach the 10 years old (although there are cases of male lions older than that), it is when they start to weaken and the possible competitors are usually young and vigorous. If they come out of the fight for supremacy alive, they will most likely turn away and die of their war wounds.
The life of a lion is hard, hostile and continuously full of dangers. Bearing in mind that for every three females there is one male lion, and knowing that they are born in equal numbers, we can get an idea of how difficult it is for them to survive in the wild, as well as the fact that females can reach 16 years of age. I hope that I have changed the perspective of this beautiful animal a bit, and that the next time we hear someone dismiss it, we will come to its defence by telling it this information.
Impilo enh aventureros!
Comments