Some Called it a Miracle. The unique lioness was named “Kamunyak” or the “Blessed One.” She’s the kind of lioness who adopts Oryx calves for some unknown reason. The news was treated with a lot of skepticism since an Oryx is a type of antelope upon which lions would normally prey.
Experts were at a loss to explain the big cat’s affection towards the calves. But the said lioness has been protecting her adopted young from danger and had allowed them to be nursed by their biological mothers.
Everybody likes a good story about a lion lying down with a lamb. But in nature, “the lamb always gets eaten,” said ecologist Craig Packer, director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota. “It’s quite common for cats to play with their prey and they can look very gentle doing it. But it always ends in tears,” he said.
According to Packer, the scene depicted in the photos is familiar to anyone who has studied lions, and to anyone who has ever watched their cat catch a mouse. “These are just variations on the theme of cat-and-mouse, where cats capture their prey and play with it until they either get bored and leave it or get hungry and eat it,” he told Life’s Little Mysteries.
Lions and other large cats can be surprisingly gentle when playing with young, feeble prey, he noted, but only in order to keep the creature alive and prolong the game of cat-and-mouse. What Would Happen If a Lion Have Fought a Tiger?
Despite being in danger, the baby kob (a type of antelope) in the photos doesn’t try to escape the lion. Packer explained that its flight instinct hasn’t kicked in yet. Like baby impalas and gazelles, baby kobs are “hiders.”
While their mothers graze, they hide in the underbrush, staying still and docile to minimize their chance of detection. “So, when they are detected, they just kind of stand around,” Packer said. “They don’t know how to run away. When they see the lion, they are responding to the presence of a large, warm body.”
Perhaps, in this case, the lioness eventually killed and ate the baby kob. Perhaps she got bored before she got hungry, and let the creature wander off and starve to death. “Nobody follows these things so persistently that they can tell you what happens at the end of the encounter,” Packer said. “But either way, nature is not ‘The Lion King,’ with the warthog and all that.”
