On second watch, I realized that the Lannister army had lions with them as mascots. D’oh. I was thinking on first watch that having lions on the battlefield was a stupid idea and forgot that a lion is their sigil. 
To be honest unleashing lions on your enemies seems less dumb that just bringing them along as pets…
How do the lions tell which people to eat?
I’d assume training. Might make great terror weapons–if you’ve already broken the line sic the lions on them, those soldiers not already running might just decide it was a good idea.
If I was a low level Lannister grunt, I’d be a little nervous about those lion cages being opened, seeing as how I’d probably have enemy blood on me and all.
Using lions as war weapons would be crazy. You can do it with horses and elephants because they’re very trainable and a rider controls them. But you’re not going to get a lion to be a useful weapon of war.
It’s a status symbol / intimidation. The idea being that if your army is powerful enough that they can spare the resources to carry around exotic animals as a mascot, that’s pretty intimidating.
That’s what the Lannister yarn-archers are for. Shoot balls of yarn into the enemy ranks, and then loose the lions.
Yeah, this. The Lannisters are unspeakably wealthy; bringing caged wild animals that serve no practical purpose just to show off is a major flex for them.
Of course, that’s how they want to portray things. In actuality, it is implied that the castle they’ll be garrisoning will be feeding them (and their lions) as guests. So in fact, the Lannisters are throwing around other people’s money and resources rather than their own.
HBO and the show’s creators would be glad to turn ONE book into ten seasons, if they thought they could get away with it. Sssttttrrretch it out!
I don’t think they’re getting away with it. But of course it can be done: with the aforementioned Tolkien books, each of the Lord of the Rings books got one movie. When they became huge successes, the one slim volume that preceded the trilogy became three movies—which did very well indeed, financially. (Even though reviews were mixed.)
So it’s understandable that Martin and his producers figured they’d go for the gold. Sssstrrretch!!
In re “Smallfolk”—I don’t think this is the episode that fans of the show would recommend in order to convince someone to give the series a try. Too many characters had to carry the stupid ball in order to make the plot go. (Really, the Hightowers are too dimwitted, in the absence of Otto, to realize that letting the city-folk starve is a rather bad idea???)