Male Lion takes down Cape Buffalo with ease

[Wyatt]

Hardcastle Bolushi oldgreengrolar CoolJohnson PumAcinonyx SuperCat Musth ophio 

[Wyatt]

I’d love to hear some thoughts or opinions on this.

[Deleted]

This isn't anything new.

[Wyatt]

Jun 24, 2023 18:58:46 GMT @ling said:

This isn't anything new.

It is

[Hardcastle]

Not to me. I grew up watching single lions and even single lionesses pull off buffalo kills regularly on BBC, national geographic, animal planet and discovery channel etc. To me it's well known they can do it, even if sometimes a whole pride can fail.

Lions and tigers are genuine big bovine killers. That is actually what they should be thought of as being, first and foremost. The cat design adapted for targetting large bovines. That is lions and tigers in a nutshell.

The pride for the lion is more about rival predators than prey. A male lion single handedly hunting and killing an antelope would surprise me, because they are very bad at that, but they are good with buffalo.

[Wyatt]

I’d say though that cats are better at grappling than subduing. Lions especially.

[Hardcastle]

I don't separate grappling and subduing and wrestling. They are all different terminology for the same thing really - controlling the target and rendering it helpless.

The small little detail that felines use their little hands is immaterial, uninteresting, and irrelevant to anything worth getting hung up on. It doesn't change subjugation into something else, it's just a superficial stylistic difference.

What is very impressive in big cats is their killing ability. In that respect they make dogs and bears and mustelids all look clumsy and oafish. Once they have something subdued and rendered helpless, they are very efficient and skilled with ending its life quite quickly and with decisive precision. If cat fans JUST focused on that and bragged about that, and then also bragged about the stealth and acrobatic talents, I'd have nothing to argue with. The problem is they celebrate those things and then simultaneously act like there are no counter-weaknesses in other departments, like they match dogs and bears and mustelids in every department but then are ALSO much better killers and much more acrobatic and stealthy. Like they're just all around flawless and the best. That is where they have run into problems with me.

[oldgreengrolar]

It is not a surprise.

[PumAcinonyx SuperCat]

Wyatt , it's not all too surprising seeing that big cats all over the world are designed to take on wild cattle beasts much larger than themselves. But the GENERAL rule is that lions have to work together to kill healthy adult buffaloes.

[Bolushi]

Jun 28, 2023 13:13:15 GMT PumAcinonyx SuperCat said:

Wyatt , it's not all too surprising seeing that big cats all over the world are designed to take on wild cattle beasts much larger than themselves. But the GENERAL rule is that lions have to work together to kill healthy adult buffaloes.

Multiple lions don't always help much. Sometimes there's too many. A good analogy is how the same way too many boardogs start becoming sloppy and shitty with too many numbers, lions do too. There needs to be enough space to go around. Too many lions and there's always one to gore or toss, and they get thrown off their best game. Big game catch dogs and big game catch cats suffer from similar issues with too many numbers, they can't monopolize their numbers well at all. They're designed to be able to work alone, on prime healthy game animals. Both are aiming to secure the animal's head and then go on from there, no matter how many you add it's of little use at all if it's any more than 2 and even 2 depends on the situation as to whether it's better or worse. You have dogs/lions getting in the way, getting hurt, "someone will do it for me, why should I face this danger?" etc. etc.
Lions are social because everything else is social and they need to not die to hyenas and african wild dogs. Tigers kill adult healthy buffalo alone sometimes, why doesn't the general rule apply to them?
I think the general rule is no amount of lions will be able to defeat a prime bull buffalo in most instances. Not "1 can't do it but 5 can".

[Hardcastle]

I agree with Bolushi on this one.

By defnition a good healthy adult buffalo should not be preyed upon by anything. That is when an optimal prey animal is invulnerable and spreading it's seed for the next generation. The species works by those individuals not being killed during that time, and they tend to have an advantage for that reason. Predators pick off the individuals who AREN'T that. That's what predators are for. Predators can get by and be successful while being incapable of killing the best, so that is the level they are generally at.

Whether the predators are working in a pack shouldn't matter, the prey should STILL have an advantage if it is a prime breeding specimen.

And yes, numbers aren't that advantageous. They are somewhat advantageous, but I feel like people get really carried away with how advantageous. And yes, they can even lead to predators performing worse.

The exception to that would be predators who are specifically fundamentally adapted for eons to operate in a pack with extreme cohesion. That is the "hunting dogs" species such as the african wild dog, the indian dhole, and the bush dog of south america.
That is not lions. Lions actually suck with pack strategy and pack cohesion. So do spotted hyenas. To some extent wolves suck too, and so do domestic dogs by extension. Wolves became social relative recently in their evolution, so did spotted hyenas, and so did lions. It wasn't that long ago the ancestors of the wolf were more like the jackals. The closest relative of the grey wolf is thought to be the African Golden wolf, with Coyotes and Golden Jackals, also fairly closely related, and then the Ethiopian wolf. Notice how none of these animals form packs like the grey wolf, and this indicates what the grey wolf also was recently. Note that many subspecies and regional populations of the grey wolf are STILL more like coyotes/african wolves/golden jackals/ethiopian wolves in their social structure; Forming pairs, sometimes kind of working with their children, etc etc. This is still basically how wolves work, and they really are more like jackals than "hunting dogs", BUT when conditions are good SOME grey wolves kind of cling onto their offspring a little longer and the family spreads out a little more. This is a recent behavioural mutation by only SOME wolves, and they are still fairly primitive socially.
The same is true for lions, who descend from solitary european jaguars. And spotted hyenas, who descend from something more like a brown or striped hyena- a lone wandering opportunist.

Wolves, lions and spotted hyenas all likely increased their sociality not for hunting purposes, but for competition with pack-hunting dogs. Like Lycaon pictus, but also like the now extinct Xenocyon and Aenocyon. You still see clues in their hunting that they are not genuine pack animals. Where pack size greatly improves the predatory prowess of Lycaon pictus or the Dhole, it doesn't really impact the predatory success of lions, spotted hyenas or wolves.

Lone lionesses have pulled off very efficient and precise kills on adult buffalo, and their performance was usually actually better than a pride of lions who, like domestic hunting dogs, seem to visibly relax and lose focus when there are too many of them participating. An attitude like "someone else will probably do it" seems to seep into their performance and they look worse.

There may be exceptions to this, and cases where a pride can take something that a lone lion can not. For giraffes this seems to possibly be true and I think that is because distraction plays a role in allowing the male lion to sneak up and anchor down on the rump of the giraffe, but for buffalo I have not really seen it to be the case. I've seen prides look terrible and I've seen lone lionesses look great.

[PumAcinonyx SuperCat]

I'll have to take some time to respond to Bolushi and Hardcastle . It will take some time to write. But I get and understand where you both are coming from.