Despite the realistic-looking animal characters, Disney’s The Lion King is not an accurate depiction of what happens in the African savanna, zoologists and lion researchers say.
“It’s always a matriarch who actually leads a lion pride,” said Craig Saffoe, the curator of great cats at Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington. Simba’s mother, Sarabi, would have been the more likely leader of the group. The movie would have been more accurate if it were called The Lion Queen.
Although male lions appear much bigger and more aggressive, females are more dominant, Saffoe said. They do the important decision-making. They are in charge of hunting and cub-raising. They also have to protect their territory against other intruding females and decide when to let in new males.
In a typical African pride, there are three to six adult females. Most daughters are recruited to stay with their mother’s pride until they die, so there are often several generations of related females, making lion society quite matriarchal.
Two or three adult males also live with the females. They are usually brothers or pride mates who have formed a coalition to help protect the females. But they spend only a few years with the pride — long enough to produce offspring — before they go out and seek a new one.
So if Disney had followed typical big cat behavior, Scar and Mufasa would have happily co-existed in their pride. Saffoe said, “It’s possible that Mufasa would have been the more dominant one in the coalition, but one of the females would have been dominant over both of them.”
One aspect of lion family life that Disney did get right is the affection Mufasa shows to his son.
When adult males return from patrolling the pride territory, they seem to enjoy getting to know their cubs, with lots of licking, head rubbing and purring involved. “It is ridiculously cute,” Saffoe said.
In a pride, each lioness has two to four cubs, all of whom bask in their father’s attention. Sometimes lionesses may give birth to a single cub, which would create a relationship like Simba and Mufasa’s.
But even when there are more cubs around, adult males treat all the little ones tenderly. That’s because when female lions ovulate, they shed a lot of eggs that may be fertilized by the same male or by different males. “Fathers can’t tell which cubs are theirs, so they just decide ‘I’ll be nice to all of them’ as a handy rule of thumb,” said Craig Packer, the director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota.
For male cubs, paternal affection lasts until they are about 2 years old. Then males start undergoing puberty, and the surge of testosterone starts threatening the adults.
If Disney’s Mufasa had lived until Simba was 2, he would have run his own son out of the pride. Then Simba would have roamed the savanna for a year or two until he joined a new pride around the age of 5.
In the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, or Kaza, a giant network of parks across five African countries, researchers rarely see male lions return to their maternal pride once they leave. So no matter why Simba left, or regardless of whether the conspiracy theorists who say that Simba and Nala are related are right, it is unlikely that he would have ended up back in the pride with his childhood love interest.
Style on 07/29/2019