Bruce Anderson

TRAVEL SPECIAL: Pride and preservation

Bruce Anderson joins the Masai on an eco-friendly safari

issue 25 January 2003

A PAIR of lionesses were ambling through the grass; three cubs were scampering around them. A delightful spectacle, but this was the African bush, not Disneyland. The lionesses were not going for a stroll. It was many hours since their last meal, so they were out to kill and feed.

As for the cubs, they were playing regardless of their doom. I said to our guide that they had presumably survived the worst menaces that overshadow leonine infancy, but was told that this was not the case. Unfortunately for them, the leader of their little pride was a ten-year-old lion. That is late middle-age in the lion world and, in the same neighbourhood, a four-year-old lion was lurking. Driven from his pride by a seven-year-old, he was looking for lionesses of his own, and in a fight he would probably be too strong for a ten-year-old. Even if the older fellow defied the odds and fought off the four-year-old, there would soon be other challengers.

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