Animal portraiture

by Richard Lydekker

THE lion, undoubtedly, owes his title of “king of beasts” to the flowing mane with which his head and fore-quarters are adorned, as this confers upon him a dignity and grandeur of appearance entirely lacking in his maneless partner. Without his mane it is, indeed, more than questionable whether a lion would not be outclassed in style by a tiger. As it is, however, the lion, at all events so far as appearance goes, has an undisputed claim to his royal title; the magnificent mien of his draped head and shoulders, his bold, imperious eye, the powerful build of his lithe body, and his resounding roar of defiance, presenting the very ideal of supreme strength and sovereignty.

The tawny coat, which varies in tint from greyish or yellowish brown to yellow, is evidently intended to harmonise with the dry grasses and the yellow sand of the semi-desert tracts which form the favourite haunts of the lion; and this is confirmed by the fact that the newborn cubs are mottled with dark brown, thus indicating their descent from a species with a mottled or spotted coat adapted to a different environment. Indeed, Somali lions frequently retain traces of these spots, more especially in the female; and in German East Africa there exists a race of the lion in which both sexes are more or less fully and distinctly spotted.

In popular estimation the lion is inseparably connected with Africa, where it formerly ranged from one end of the continent to the other, although it has long since disappeared from most parts of Tunis and Algeria, as well as from Cape Colony. As a matter of fact, Felis leo is as much an Asiatic as an African animal; while in the time of Xenophon it was probably found so far west as Thrace and Macedonia. Earlier still, that is to say in prehistoric times, its range included the greater part of temperate Europe, not excepting the British Isles. Unlike the tiger, however, the lion never inhabited the countries to the east of the Bay of Bengal, nor penetrated to the swamps of Lower Bengal itself, which are unsuited to its habits. Even so late as the Mutiny, lions were to be met with over a considerable tract in central India; although they are nowadays restricted to that district of Kathiawar, known as the Gir, where they survive only by protection. In the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris, as well as in parts of Persia, lions are still to be met with; but how numerous they are in these countries is difficult to ascertain.

In Africa lions appear to be most abundant in the British, German, and Portuguese eastern provinces, in some districts of which they seem bolder and more prone to attack human beings than in many other parts of the continent. In Somaliland, where they are smaller and greyer than usual, their number has been greatly reduced of late years. The handsomest lions of all are those with dark brown or black manes; but in some parts of the country, at all events, black-maned lions do not form a distinct race, as dark and light maned cubs may be found in the same litter.

Although the skulls of the two species present considerable differences, a lioness, apart from the absence of stripes, is not unlike a tiger in general appearance; and it has long been a question whether the lion or the tiger is the more powerful animal, although the balance of opinion seems to be in favour of the tiger’s claim to superiority in this respect. Certain it is, that the lion is much the more noisy animal of the two; a tiger never roaring in the persistent manner characteristic of the lion. The impression caused by the lion’s roar appears to depend greatly on the idiosyncrasy of the listener and the circumstances under which it is heard. Very noteworthy is the fact that the roar of the two species is essentially similar in character.

As a rule, lions, when too feeble to capture more active prey, turn into regular man-eaters much less frequently than tigers; but this may be in part explained by the bolder nature of many African tribes, as compared with the natives of a large extent of India; and when a lion makes himself obnoxious, such tribes have no hesitation in attacking and destroying the marauder.

Lions in Africa subsist, to a great extent, on the flesh of antelopes and zebras, or bontequaggas; generally stalking their game in parties of two or three, but one alone making the fatal spring. When stalking, a lion stretches out its body to the fullest extent, and crawls so close to the ground that even in low grass its presence is generally undetected till too late. Occasionally a party of lions combine their forces to pull down a large animal like a buffalo. Zebras can defend themselves only by kicking, but the gemsbok and the sable antelope will pin a lion with their horns, and sometimes come off victorious.

It has been very generally stated that lions are mainly, if not exclusively, monogamous, and that they mate for life. It has, however, been pointed out by Mr. Roosevelt that if this were really the case, they would almost always be found in pairs, that is to say, a lion and a lioness together. That they are thus found not infrequently may, indeed, be freely admitted; but, on the other hand, it is much commoner to come across a lioness and her cubs, an old lion with several lionesses and their young, a single lion or lioness, a couple of lions and lionesses, or, lastly, a small troop, which may be composed either solely of males or females, or of a mixture of the two sexes. “These facts,” writes the great American hunter, “are not compatible with the romantic theory in question.”

The cubs, generally two or three in number, come into the world, unlike kittens, with their eyes open, and are then about one-third the size of a cat. As already mentioned, they are heavily mottled with brown on a tawny ground, and it is very significant that these markings are to a great extent intermediate in character between the rosettes of leopards and jaguars and the stripes of the tiger. A peculiar feature in which the cubs of lions differ from those of leopards and jaguars, and thereby resemble those of tigers, is the presence of a white spot near the summit of the back of each ear. From these facts it has been inferred, in the first place, that the lion is most nearly related to the tiger, and, in the second place, that lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars are all members of a single group. As regards the mutual relationships of these species, it is generally believed that spots represent an earlier and more primitive type of colouring than transverse stripes, and it is therefore inferred that the stripes of the tiger, which are very frequently partially split or double, have been derived from the fusion of leopard-like rosettes into transverse chains. As the self-coloured coat of the adult lion is evidently a modern feature, it seems clear that tigers and lions are to be regarded as the most specialised members of the whole group.