Tag: lion

In 1850 Alfred Lord Tennyson published the poem In Memoriam A.H.H. It commemorated the life of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam who had died at just 22 years of age 17 years earlier. It was at a time when science and religion were posing different answers to the fundamental questions. It was an immense work (2,916 lines and getting bigger in subsequent editions). Tennyson wasn’t the first or last to wonder if God is the great and good creator of all why He is so careless with individual lives …

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

Darwin’s Origin of Species came in 1859. One of Tennyson’s 2,916 lines, perhaps the most memorable of them all, came to sum up the implications of the survival of the fittest.

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed

Would Lions find the elephant? We would not know the answer because we would move to our next camp before they showed up but there was no shortage of lions.

We had the opportunity to see them at work and at rest, adults and young, hunting, feeding, copulating, suckling, grooming. We were not present at a kill but witnessed close escapes by Impala and Warthog and a standoff with a herd of Buffalo.

How much do they hunt and how much do they scavenge? The world wide web suggests that they might scavenge somewhere between 10 and 50 per cent of their food varying with pride size, season, territory and gender. Male Lions are said to be lazier than the females as well as bigger. If they have a lioness to do the work they just eat, if not then they take the easy option and scavenge when they can, hunt when they can’t.

For every kilogram of carnivore there needs to be about 10kg of herbivore. For every 10kg of herbivore there needs to be about 100kg of herbs. And providing all the energy for the herbs is the sun.

Corollary. For every photograph of a carnivore there should be ten photographs of herbivores. That’s not the way it works though, the carnivores get the lion’s share even in a figure of speech. There will be more …