Caroline Arnold - Lion

CONTENTS

We are extremely grateful to the staff at Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon, for their assistance with this project. In particular, we would like to thank Shimon Russell, senior carnivore ranger; Dr. Jack Mortenson, veterinarian; Sally Perkins, director of marketing and education; and Kassie McLellan, public relations assistant. We would also like to give special thanks to Don Jim and Eliot Brenowicz for their help. And, as always, we thank our editor, Andrea Curley, for her continuing enthusiastic support.

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A red sun rises on the eastern horizon as a mother lion gives her three-month-old cubs an early morning wash. With gentle licks, her rough tongue combs and cleans their short spotted coats. The little male lions sit still for a moment but are soon ready to play. While their mother watches quietly, the cubs tumble with each other and roll in the grass. Their soft round bodies seem awkward now, but by the time the cubs grow up, they will have the powerful, coordinated movements of adults.

The young cubs and their mother live with six other African lions at Wildlife Safari, a wild animal park in southern Oregon. The keepers know the lions well and have given each of them a name. They call the mother lion Sheeba, and her two cubs are Keno and Tsavo (pronounced SAH-vo). (Tsavo is a national park in Kenya where many wild lions live.)

The lions at Wildlife Safari occupy a large grassy area where they have plenty of room to move around. Enclosed dens provide shelter at night and when the weather is cold or rainy. The lions receive good care from the park staff and are able to live much as they would in the wild. Although the climate in Oregon is somewhat cooler than that of the lions natural habitat, the landscape is similar in many ways to the places where wild lions live.

Most people never have the chance to see lions in the wild. Animal parks like Wildlife Safari provide an opportunity to get close to lions and learn more about them. Park staff supervise visitors as they drive through the lion enclosure and watch the animals through the closed windows of their vehicles. Although the park animals are not tame, they are used to having cars nearby and pay little attention to them.

In the wild, lions are found mainly on the grassland and open woodland of Africa south of the Sahara Desert. A few wild lions also live in India. All lions are of the same species and have the scientific name Panthera leo. Until ancient times, lions roamed across much of Europe. Up to the 1930s, they were found in many parts of Asia and the Middle East as well. Lions gradually disappeared in these regions as a result of hunting, climate changes, and the development of wild lands for farms and ranches.

Today, Asian lions are extremely endangered. The two hundred Asian lions that live in the Gir Forest in India are protected from hunters. They are the last of this subspecies living in the wild. African lions are not endangered, but their long-term survival is threatened by the diminishing of their natural habitat. Most African lions live in wild game preserves.

African Lions

Like domestic cats, lions are members of the cat family, or felids. If you watch a lion in a wild animal park or zoo, you can see it eat, play, stretch, and sleep in many of the same ways that your pet cat does. Scientists divide the 35 species of felids into three groups, according to similarities in body structure. They are the big cats, the small cats, and the cheetah. Listed in order of their size, the six species of big cats are the tiger, lion, leopard, jaguar, snow leopard, African lions, and clouded leopard. The small cats include the domestic cat; bobcat; puma, which is the largest cat in this group; and 25 other species. One difference between the big and small cats is that the big cats can roar and the small cats cannot. The cheetah is in its own group because it is unique in many of its physical characteristics and is more distantly related to the other cat species. A fourth group of felids, the saber-toothed cats, became extinct about 10,000 years ago.

Domestic cats.

Lions are the second largest of the big cats. Only the Siberian tiger, which is 12 feet (3.6 meters) long and weighs up to 700 pounds (318 kilograms), is bigger.

Cheetah.

Adult male lion.

A fully grown male lion is about 4 feet (1.2 meters) high at the shoulder and 9 feet (2.7 meters) long from the nose to the tip of the tail. A male lion usually weighs between 300 and 400 pounds (130180 kilograms), but a very large one may weigh over 500 pounds (230 kilograms). An adult female lion, also called a lioness, is smaller. She is about 3 feet (0.9 meters) at the shoulder and about 8 to 9 feet (2.4 to 2.7 meters) long. She weighs between 250 and 350 pounds (115160 kilograms).