Lion vs donkey part 2
The donkey takes on the lion. Pictures by Clem Haagner.Clem Haagner witnessed an encounter between a stray donkey and a lioness in the Kalahari. When the donkey caught scent of the big cat, it whirled around to face the predator. Clem describes what happened next. This article originally appeared in Custos magazine.
Here I was seeing Stoffel’s word being enacted in living form by that downtrodden, humble animal, the donkey. The lioness and the donkey stared at each other and crabbed sideways across the riverbed. I followed not too closely for fear of disturbing the tense drama. When they got to the opposite side of the bed where the riverbank sloped up gradually, to my astonishment the donkey charged the lioness, which turned tail and ran up the slope with the donkey after it. I couldn’t believe my eyes. In all the donkey chased the lioness for about 150 metres.
I wish the story had a happy ending, but unfortunately this was not to be. The donkey, thinking it had put the lioness to flight permanently, stopped and started walking back to the riverbed. Here it made a fatal mistake, for as soon as the donkey turned around, the lioness stopped and ran towards the donkey at a fair pace and leapt, grabbing the donkey’s hindquarters with both paws. I expected the lioness to go immediately for the throat or muzzle to suffocate the donkey, but it seemed to be afraid of the “biting end”. Who knows what dangers those teeth might hold.
The lioness was biting chunks out of the donkey’s hindquarters. This was all happening about 100 metres from me and as I approached to photograph it all, the lioness was disturbed and let go. The donkey staggered towards me shivering. There was nothing I could do about it so I moved back to the riverbed with the donkey staggering along as best it could. The lioness walked slowly over the rise, grunting in “lion language” as it went.
Instead of leaving the scene as I had thought, the lioness had gone to call her companion and cubs. A second lioness appeared and attacked the donkey again at the hindquarters. It also seemed to be afraid to go for the throat to finish it off. The first lioness then appeared with five cubs and immediately went to the aid of its companion. Only then did one of the lionesses go for the throat and put an end to the donkey’s misery. The cubs came in to feed and so ended the drama which, quite by chance, I had witnessed. All very gruesome one thinks, but one must remember that nature in the raw can be gruesome and that carnivores don’t get their food all neatly packaged in a supermarket like we human beings do.
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