The paradox and unusualness of the lion

The lion is the most famous cat in the world (with the tiger) and at the same time the least typical member of the cat family. While other cat species are solitary hunters, the lion is a cooperative group hunter or at least the lionesses are. Male lions like to hunt alone in denser vegetation using the stalk and ambush technique whereas lionesses, as you've seen in video, cooperate with wing lionesses and a central lioness when chasing prey.

Male lions in a coalition. Photo: Daily Mail. These are black maned lions. The dark mane is attractive to females.

This difference in the behaviour of the female and male lion is also shown in the quite stark difference between the male and female in terms of appearance. Most cats do not have great gender differences in appearance. 

There will be size differences but other than that they look very similar. But with lions the huge mane of the male sets him apart from the maneless female (some females have manes). Lionesses prefer males with dark manes. They presumably sense that they are more likely to have better genes and more able to create a healthy family.

Black knob at the end of a lion's tail and a cub who wants to play with it. Photo: Pinterest.

And unusualness about the lion is that it is the only cat species to have a knob-like tuft of dark hair at the tip of its tail.

The paradox of the lion is that it is both the most popular animal in the world or at least in the top three. It is also the most admired with the tiger and yet trophy hunters seek to destroy it for their entertainment. And the rarer the individual lion the keener trophy hunters are to shoot it dead. It's a great paradox that there is both admiration and the desire to destroy present in the minds of these people at the same time.

And it also appears that the lion is both in the top 10 of animals loved and hated. It is loved because of its power, courage, aggressivity, dignified bearing and handsome appearance but it is also hated because it is a killer of nice animals, pleasant animals such as antelopes and zebra. The lion is a brilliant killer with huge amounts of aggressivity.

Our admiration for the lion is tinged by a fear of its ability to kill. The general consensus is that the lion wins in a lion versus tiger fight but genuine fights between these species are rare because they live in different parts of the world.

Is India creating a reservoir for Covid-19 in its animal population?

It has been mooted before that there is a potential for a reservoir of the Covid-19 virus to be built up within the animal population both domestic and wild and this issue needs to be addressed. It comes to mind particularly because I was a little shocked but perhaps unsurprised to read that 35 zookeepers at Hyderabad's Nehru Zoological Park have tested positive for the virus. As a consequence eight of the zoo's Asiatic lions contracted the disease. It is believed, and it's entirely plausible, that the lions contracted the disease from zookeepers, surrounded as they were by a large number of infected humans.

Asiatic lion that caught Covid-19 from one of 35 zookeepers who tested positive for Covid-19. Photo: Jam Press.

The experts still say that there is no evidence that lions and other animals can transmit the disease back to humans but it seems entirely possible and indeed likely that they do because as this disease can travel between human and animal, it can move between animal and human. After all that's exactly how humans got it in the first place i.e. from a wet market in Wuhan ostensibly from a pangolin which got the disease from a bat but because China has been so secretive about it we don't know for sure.

The idea of animals, regrettably, forming a reservoir for the disease is brought into focus by this story from Hyderabad, India. India is suffering an enormous surge in infections at over 400,000 per day at the date of this post. They are grossly underestimating, or misrepresenting for political reasons, the deaths which everybody realises. The pictures of funeral pyres in car parks tells the true story. The death rate is probably 10 times higher than the official figures whoch are at around 3,500 dead. This would make the true figure near 35k.

Indeed, the BBC reported on 13 funeral pyres outside, I believe. Modi's residence and the government declared that there were just seven so a blatant misrepresentation has been perpetrated but the news is obviously distorted.

The point though is that when there are such vast numbers of infections, and the infection level is probably much higher than the high level stated, it seems highly likely that animals are being infected at a similar rate but nobody knows what is going on because India is overrun by this virus.

The Indian government does not want to put the country back into lockdown because around 80% of the 400 million Indian workforce are casual labourers being paid by the day. If they don't work they don't earn anything and they can starve to death. In the last lockdown they all went back to their homes so Modi and his government can't lock the country down to try and curb the virus.

Despite being the global centre of vaccination production, India is running out of vaccination and their rate of vaccination is incredibly low because of catastrophic logistics. It just seems to be a complete disaster, top to bottom, and there is going to be a long, long journey back to normality if and when it happens.