Big Game Shooting, volume 1 (of 2)Phillipps-Wolley, Clive
General
Big Game Shooting, volume 1 (of 2)
Phillipps-Wolley, Clive
Game and game-birds; Hunting
Two instances have come under my notice of lions eating the remains
of one of their own species, and I think that when hungry they would
never be above such acts of cannibalism, but they would probably prefer
something else, just as a shipwrecked sailor would prefer Polar bear to
a steak off the comrade who had drawn the fatal lot. But with lions,
as with shipwrecked sailors, necessity knows no law, and I don’t
think any the worse of them because they are occasionally driven to
cannibalism.
There has been much discussion as to the manner in which lions kill
their prey. In ‘Wild Beasts and their Ways,’ the last of the many
interesting works on travel, sport and natural history for which
Englishmen are indebted to Sir Samuel Baker, that great authority says
that the lion uses his paw in attack with which to deal a crushing
blow in contradistinction to the tiger, which only makes use of its
claws to hold its prey. Now it is always possible that in a vast
continent like Africa animals of one species may develop different
habits in widely separated portions of the country; but, however that
may be, all my experience goes to show that, in Southern Africa, lions
kill their prey very much in the same way as Sir Samuel Baker tells
us tigers do in India; that is, they use their claws to hold their
victim, and do the killing with their teeth. A single large male lion
will sometimes kill a heavy ox or a buffalo cow, without using his
teeth at all, by breaking its neck, or rather causing the frightened
beast to break its own neck. Almost invariably when an ox or a buffalo
has been killed by a single lion, deep claw marks will be found on
the muzzle of the animal, and when that is the case, it will usually
be found that the neck has been dislocated. Such animals have been
killed in the following manner. We will suppose that a large heavy ox
weighing 1,000 lbs. is seized by a lion, whilst grazing or walking,
the attack being made from the left side. In that case the lion seizes
the ox by the muzzle with its left paw, pulling its head in under it.
At the same time with the extended claws of the right paw it holds its
victim by the top of the shoulder, its hind feet being firmly planted
on the ground. The ox plunges madly forward, and from the position in
which its head is held not seeing where it is going, and hampered by
the weight of the lion, soon falls, and rolling over, as often as not
breaks its neck by the weight of its own body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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