A picture from the 8-volume series by Johann Bechstein, ‘Getreue Abbildungen Naturhistorischer Gegenstände’ (Realistic Pictures from Natural History), issued between 1795 and 1807. Seven of those volumes are available from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. (click through on a volume – band – then on anything below ‘Inhalt’, and then on ‘Vorschau’ for thumbnail pages.)
When your safari guide tells you not to go outside of your tent at night, you should always respect this advice. Night is the right time for predators like lions to hunt. Most accidents in Tanzania happen in the last hours of the day or the beginning of the night.
This is shown in the peak appearing on the right of the graph I borrowed from a scientific study titled “Fear of Darkness, the Full Moon and the Nocturnal Ecology of African Lions” and published in Plos One by Craig Packer, Alexandra Swanson, Dennis Ikanda and Hadas Kushnir.
They have looked at lion-involved accidents in Tanzania statistics. They have drawn a few conclusions:
Fear of darkness is there for a reason.
Attack rates double during the 10 days following a full Moon.
North Tanzania is a lot safer.
Lions are dangerous.
Human beings are not well equipped to fight one or more lions.
Kevin Richardson is a friend of animals who succeeded in doing things that few people would dare to try: Be completely admitted inside a lion’s den, inside a group of big cats. These animals do not usually play with human beings, but they are highly social animals and this is what Kevin Richardson used to have them accept him – through sobmission and game.
Honnestly, even understanding the rules which allow to reach this point, even firmly convinced by the scientific bases of this approach to inter-species contacts, I would not try it.
As a demonstration, here are a few videos showing Kevin since he moved from the status of friend of lions to honorary lion (like you could speak of a “honorary citizen”).
I let you admire the other anmials (hyenas, leopards) that also let him approach. But keep in mind that these are really big animals. Look at a male lion size. These are “Big cats”, indeed.
When you set a camera up to watch lion behaviour, you should be prepared for some wild uses of it. Here is what happened in Tswalu Kalahari Game Reserve
This Canadian artist works on painted pictures whose realism is striking (most people often think they are photographs, at first) and it is quite pleasing to see the very natural and touching attitudes of most of the painted animals. See some of his big cats.
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