Lion Drama In The Mara: Big Lion Grabs A Sub-Adult | Zebra Plains

hi everybody i'm rob the ranger and welcome to my channel before we get started this video does contain scenes that may cause distress to some viewers so if you are one of those viewers please don't go any further there's a link somewhere on top above my head where you can go and watch something cute and cuddly instead all right so a week ago i shared this video that you're going to see on social media it is one young lion getting attacked by a much bigger lion we're going to go straight into that video and then afterwards we'll discuss and give a little bit more context about what happened [Music] yes so not a particularly nice sighting to see interesting yes bit of excitement yes but unpleasant with the ending and when watched without any context it seems fairly unnecessary as well so what we're going to do is kind of break it down give a bit more context and understand why and how the situation came about let me start by adding some context to the situation the lionesses and youngsters in the video are the toki writers sometimes known as a rhino bridge pride they reprimand that earlier in 2018 lost all of their dominant males the complications of old age and the second male that was with them then left the area due to the pressure put on by a younger stronger coalition the two males in the video are two of that younger stronger coalition the bilasaka males they are six males in total and they are currently taking over the pride of the tokyo pride that is seen in the video so as these bilateral males came into contact with the tofu pride obviously there was no resistance as the males had gone the youngsters of the pride that were signed by the previous males were varying ages and quite a few of the older sub-adults moved off and formed a little splinter group which we can see here some of the remaining sub-adults were females which the males seem to accept as potential breeding stock and two of the very much younger males that were part of the pride stayed around where their mother was one of those has not been seen for a few months and the other one is the one featured in the video so generally the young male here had been staying out of the way of the big males uh only joining their females to feed when the big mouths weren't around what seems to be the situation here is that the lionesses had made the kill and the youngster had joined them to eat and the males then turned up and taken over the kill now to start with the females were around the youngster the males were concentrating on feeding so he was still safe why they didn't move him away at that time we don't know so when i started filming the situation was that the lionesses were scattered around everywhere one big guy on the kill and the second male lying in the long grass with one of the females at that point there didn't seem to be any undue aggression going on obviously the male and the kill was a bit grumpy defending it from the others wanted it all to himself and we thought it was just going to be a nice sighting of a lion eating after a while the second male suddenly got up and started stalking around you can see here that the young suffered put his head up in the grass i think it was at that point they've realized that it was a sub-adult male rather than one of the other younger lionesses he went stalking around and you see the female the mother getting up trying to distract the second male's attention which left the younger male on his own unattended and as the male moved around the tree the younger male obviously moved a little bit too close to the male he was feeding so now the young male is in basically double trouble too close to the male that's feeding once and defend the carcass but also not being the son of either of the males that are there and they will want to take him out in order to bring his mother back into easter so they can produce their own cups so the opportunity suddenly presented itself with the male that's on the carcass and he goes in for the attack as we see so we see the attack slow down a little bit here it's a bite shake and a drag and then releases the other lines it's fairly quick but very very efficient typically when lions are going after rivals they do go for the spine for the back like that it is a weak spot and with a younger male like this [Music] what's happened looking at the aftermath is that either one of the teeth has gone straight through the spinal cord and severed it or that dragon shake has snapped the spine again just to reiterate the reasoning behind what happened that young male had gotten too close to the male gotten the opportunity first to defend the kill but also to take out a youngster whose mother was spending time looking after him and therefore not mating with the males the youngster being the son of the previous dominant males not being [Music] i saw a lot when the video was first posted on social media the simple fact is that the big man has done his job uh he doesn't need to do anything more the the threat is eliminated the young male is completely immobilized he's not going to carry on he doesn't need to waste any more energy on that young male when he's got other things to think about i will move on to the what happened next the original video just shows the young male dragging his broken body away there was quite a big time gap between the attack and that particular image and we'll see some of what was going on here now a lot of people on social media are asking other that's going to come and so on and so on and yes the vets were called but not immediately the attack happened so quickly and when you look at the mail there's very little blood we weren't sure how much injury there was so we stayed and we watched and waited we weren't sure if initially it was just saw or if there was something worse obviously he was lying there looking sorry for himself we couldn't see a lot of movement because there wasn't a lot of movement he lie nest next to him with her tail flicking gave some hope because we weren't sure if it was his tail or her tail um eventually she moved away and we could see and he tried to roll over and it was very noticeable that there was something wrong with the back end of his body and then when he eventually sat up in the back was at the funny angle then the vets were called now obviously the veterinary team has a very large area to cover they didn't come immediately because even if they didn't leave immediately of the call it would still possibly take a couple of hours to get there so we weren't there when they actually arrived but they would have come they wouldn't have been able to fix him at all and that sort of injury is not fixable even in a proper hospital uh let alone after the bush so what they would have done is so by the evening the mail was gone and the pride carried on and that's just an unfortunate factor of a male 9 takeover when they do take over a pride those subs especially the sub-males are going to be the ones that are targeted to bring the females back into east so hopefully this has brought a little bit more light to the situation giving you guys that are watching a little bit more understanding as to what and why happened there hopefully i didn't waffle on too much for you um it's a good insight as to what happens during a takeover it's a good insight as to why only one in six young males do make it to adulthood and why a pride prefers having a stronger coalition being in control because there's less chance of a takeover whilst they're raising cups anyway that's uh all we've got on this subject so see you next time all right that's all for now thank you very much for watching don't forget to like subscribe and share leave a comment down below buy a t-shirt ding the notification bell all those youtube things see you next time so here's a couple of links to more videos on my channel that you might want to check out also the social networks you can follow me there for 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