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Male lions are jerks

January 31, 2014

One of the worst things I've done as a parent is take my then four year old son to see Disney's documentary-style nature film African Cats. In it, Samuel Jackson and Patrick Stewart narrate the partially successful struggle of a mother cheetah to raise her cubs and the unsuccessful struggle of an alpha male lion, Fang (so named for a hideously looking broken tooth that juts out of his mouth) to protect his family.

The narration around Fang concerning the successful coup by his replacement alpha male, Kali, is almost surreal. We get all of these "Lion King" type quips about the noble role male lions play in protecting the female lions and their cubs, even as the female lions are really doing all of the work hunting the food and raising the babies. For 95% of the time the male lion just lies around doing nothing and/or taking food away from his family.

The only way Jackson/Stewart are able to make this have any resemblance to Mufasa and Simba from the Lion King is by stressing how the male lion protects the female lions. But what on earth could a female lion need protection from? I mean, they are just these incredible killing machines. Very slowly in the movie it begins to dawn on you that the only thing male lions protect female lions and their cubs from is the vile depredations other male lions.

Anyhow, it's a good thing that human gender norms are nothing at all like that. We'd be in terrible shape if they were.

Posted in Jon Cogburn

7 responses to “Male lions are jerks”

James Rocha

January 31, 2014

You are pointing to something very important here. One of the strange divisions in our common discussions of animals is how we try to be very careful not to attribute to animals positive human attributes (some level of reasoning, deep feeling, etc.), but we tend to be quite happy to attribute our gender norms to them.

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Jon Cogburn

January 31, 2014

But, contrariwise, we’re also quite happy to fail to recognize when we instantiate their gender norms.
I think that all of the weird Lion King type things Jackson and Stewart say in the movie are mostly desperate attempts to cover this over.

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Yan

January 31, 2014

It’s also interesting how the attempt to transpose Disney fantasy animals onto real nature reflects the deep inconsistency attempts to justify gender norms. Sometimes they’re justified by positive appeal to nature: a natural feature conducive to our natural good. Other times they’re justified by fatalistic negative appeals to nature: it’s horrible, but we’re animals, that’s the way we have to be. It’s always either God or Lucifer, Mother Nature or Werner Herzog, always a moralistically translation of nature. What both are really trying to cover up is the amoralism of nature, it’s purposelessness and accidentally–which leads to absurdities like needing male lions only to protect from male lions.

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Joe

February 4, 2014

I don’t know whether it’s the movie or the post, but one of them seems completely misguided. Lions are territorial and live in prides. The protection of the territory in which they hunt (or gaining new one) is the main role of the male lion in the pride. This means that the male lion is generally guarding the borders of the hunting area – see the position of males even in the zoo’s, leaving it to the females to hunt. The male lion is also there to protect the cubs while the females hunt (not just from other male lions, but from other predators as well as from other dangers – buffalo’s and so on) since females generally hunt in packs (for effectiveness) and would have to leave the cubs alone. So they’re not useless jerks, although they are certainly not the ones responsible for hunting. But it is not true that male lions do not hunt at all, but they are nowhere as good at it as the females.

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Jon Cogburn

February 4, 2014

(1) To the extent that they protect their own cubs from other predators, couldn’t the female lions come up with some kind of babysitting arrangement like elephants do? More to the point, are there any predators (besides other male lions!) that female lions need male lions to defeat? (2) And then there’s the whole killing the cubs so the female lions go into estrus thing. Only male lions do that. (3) At this point doesn’t the whole thing start to look like a mafia protection racket? Give me that dead gazelle or else who knows what’s going to happen to the little cubs?
Imagine, on the other hand, a world where female lions reproduced asexually. A lot of needless suffering would be obviated.

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Joe

February 5, 2014

“To the extent that they protect their own cubs from other predators, couldn’t the female lions come up with some kind of babysitting arrangement like elephants do?”
Elephants are non-territorial herbivores. They do not depart from their young ones to go pick food and bring it to them. Elephants have little to no natural predators – only lions in very large prides can venture to hunt an old or sick elephant, very exceptionally. Lions do not sit down and decide about how they are going to behave as lions, so my guess is, they can’t come up with other solutions. But feel free to suggest it to them. The male lions need to defeat any other predators encroaching on the territory – including other male or female lions, hyenas, leopards, cheetahs, birds of prey, and so on. Try visiting African safari and you’ll see. Of course, they could all decide to be herbivores and solve it that way, but since they are jerks, they probably won’t.
“At this point doesn’t the whole thing start to look like a mafia protection racket? Give me that dead gazelle or else who knows what’s going to happen to the little cubs?” No.

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Joe

February 5, 2014

“And then there’s the whole killing the cubs so the female lions go into estrus thing. Only male lions do that.” Not true – infanticide because of sexual conflict is quite widespread in animal kingdom (and well-studied), including human being.

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