Guest Author - MaryEllen Schoeman

My attention was first caught by the description of this Animal Planet TV show: “The story of a young lioness in Kenya, who sets aside her predatory instincts and adopts a baby oryx.” This made no sense to me at all. An oryx is a kind of antelope, medium sized, with long almost straight horns. The babies are about the size of a newborn cow calf, and, like all mammal babies, must nurse from their mothers for a while after birth. How long depends on the species of animal, but in general grazing animals have a fairly long nursing period, since grass doesn’t have a lot of nutrients or fat , both of which the babies need to grow.

So the question that immediately came to mind was, how is this lioness feeding this baby oryx? Cat milk is very different from oryx milk – it’s much higher in protein, for one thing, and doesn’t contain the enzymes and other bacteria that a baby oryx needs in its system when it is eventually weaned. It’s not likely a baby oryx could even survive successfully on lion’s milk. And that’s assuming that the lioness has milk to give, which, I supposed, was possible if she had just lost of litter of her own. But then how would the oryx nurse? Oryx nurse standing up, as do all prey animals, so that they can be ready to run if a predator approaches. But lions and other cats nurse with the mother and the babies lying down. Could an oryx calf somehow get itself folded down enough to nurse on a prone lioness? And if so, would the angle of its head and throat allow it to suckle? Even if the lioness stood up, the oryx would have to somehow get its head under her and get a nipple, which wouldn’t work because lions don’t have udders and their nipples are very short and close to the body.

I waited anxiously for the show to come on, desperate with curiosity about how this was going to work. Finally it was time. The host of the show related in a breathless voice about a story she had heard about a lioness adopting an oryx, and how she was going to go find the two to witness this unheard-of event herself. Off she went in her Land Rover to find the miracle.

Imagine my disappointment when she found the two of them and it was immediately apparent that the calf was starving to death. The calf wobbled around pathetically, skin and bones, and the lioness followed. If the calf wandered too far, or attempted to return to a nearby herd of oryx, the lioness would push the calf back, chasing it and shoving it with her nose and body to force it away from the herd. The lioness was very young, too young to have had a litter of kittens that she was somehow trying to replace, and she too was very thin. The local villagers reported that the lioness had not left the calf to hunt since she ‘adopted’ it.

It was clear to me that the lioness had not ‘adopted’ the oryx calf, but rather that something had gone wrong with her hunting instinct. She was showing behaviors (chasing the calf away from the herd, occasionally nipping it in the backside) that would normally be hunting behaviors, but she didn’t seem to know what to do next. She was on her own, without a pride, and was also not grooming herself, as was made obvious by the huge tick infestation around her neck and head. There was clearly something wrong with her. She could have been sick to begin with (resulting in her either not being accepted into a pride or tossed out of one), of she could have been a lioness raised by humans as a pet and then released back into the wild by clueless owners who didn’t understand that she would not know how to hunt. Either way, her ‘bond’ to the baby oryx was not maternal in nature, but rather borne from confusion and illness.

But the story was presented, from the very beginning, as an inspirational story of two animals overcoming instinct to become family to each other. It was mentioned that both the calf and the lioness were starving, but that fact was overwhelmed by the story’s insistence on the relationship between the lioness and the calf. The story had also spread throughout the tourist trade and the locals, and the animals were getting tons of attention, so tourist companies and tour guides were making a fortune from it. No one wants to see a sick animal causing a baby animal to starve to death, but a “lion lies down with the lamb” story is something else. The main story ends when another lion kills and eats the baby oryx, but in a post-script the host notes that the lioness ‘adopted’ two more calves, which both starved to death, before she finally started hunting again and soon vanished into the wild.

Anthropomorphizing wild animals is always a mistake, and to me, a very sad thing, as it denies them the chance to simply be fascinating on their own. The reporting of this story, by keeping to a purely sweet and inspirational story, avoided trying to find answers to the real questions – where had the lioness come from? Had she at one time been a member of the local pride? Had anyone in the area taken in a baby lion a couple of years ago? Where did she go after this story ended? Did she find a pride to join, is she still a solitary lioness, or did she simply wander off and die? Because of the desire to get a good ‘human interest’ story out of this incident, the answers to these questions will probably never be known.

For a much better view on lions and other big cats in the wild, check out the following DVDs: