When talking about the big cats of the wild, the lion remains to be one that elicits the ideal of power and strength, long ascribed to be the very symbols of those attributes, as defined by their presence in family crests, heraldry, paintings, frescoes and more.
The 1996 movie entitled The Ghost In The Darkness – starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer – took a different take on the strength and power of the lion, this time depicting them as man killers who are intent on having human beings as prey. Based on a true story which took place in 1896, two lions had been causing unrest in a railroad construction site in East Africa, believed to have been responsible for killing 130 people.
Though the movie did well in depicting the deadly and elusive aspects of a lion, it didn’t exactly tell every interesting detail about them.
For one, lions are known to sleep for at least 20 hours a day, which practically means they are active for only short durations of time, though this is dependent on their activities and such.
Highly sociable, lions are considered to be the most sociable of all the big cats in Africa, with a group of lions consisting of around 15 members at a time. Within that group, it is the females which do all the hunting, as the males simply partake in the catch females would bring back to the group. Males are also the first to partake in the feast.
As the lion’s roar has been legendary, the average lion’s roar can actually be heard through long distances, reaching as far as 5 miles away. As long as the range of their roars are, the average lion can also run as fast as 50 miles per hour, though these speeds are mostly during short run-distance bursts. Also, a lion can leap distances as wide as 36 feet.
One contradictory thing about lions is that they may be dubbed as the “king of the jungle”, but their natural habitats are mostly plains and grasslands. Also, it has been proven that you can easily assess the age of a lion through the color of its mane. The darker the hue, the older the lion typically is.
Though they may not exactly be the kings of the jungle, lions continue to be one of the world’s most well-loved of the big cats family, proudly standing as symbols of strength and power.
Six years ago, the big cat conservation organization, Panthera, began an important surveythat would involve trekking through 17 African nations, in search of the elusive West African lion, historically considered a sub-species of Panthera leo senegalensis.
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