I’ve been to the nearby Rhino and Lion park a couple of times recently. They make a big production when feeding the animals. They first feed the wild dogs. They park the food truck in a little clearing and wait for the tourists to circle up around the clearing while the wild dogs scamper about waiting for the food. The handlers are out of the truck directing traffic and interacting with the dogs until finally throwing a couple of sides of beef (or gazelle or something) off the truck.
Then the whole production moves to a different paddock where they feed the cheetahs. Again, they wait for the tourists to circle up and then they start throwing food out to the cheetahs who are actually a little shy.
But when they move to the lion paddock things are a bit different. As soon as the truck enters the paddock the lions start following it and jumping up into the bed. The truck rolls past a post and the driver drops a chain loop over the post. The other end of the chain is attached to the leg of an entire buffalo ( or something) in the bed of the truck. As the truck keeps moving the chain drags the buffalo out of the truck unto the ground and the lions converge. You only get to see this part if you have managed to follow directly behind the food truck into the paddock because it is evidently not wise to screw around making the lions wait.
Oh yea. The same park that I had my “close encounter”* had a demonstration like that, where one of the trainers had his back to the fence and the tiger stalked exactly like that. Very cool (and scary) to see it head-on. The focus of the tiger is what is really fascinating. The tiger ended up making a full leap at the trainer’s back, right into the fence.
*I was wondering when I was there, that the fences really didn’t seem like the best security. I had a whole “Jurassic Park” premonition, that lions and tigers could accidentally get out and wander the public areas very easily. But I never heard of any incidents there, so maybe it was sufficient.
Lions can run at a top speed of about 50 mph. You can probably outrun them in your car, if you needed to. You could probably at least spoil their aim at a car window.
Not only will I not award any money to the victim, I’d make their side pay for the damages they did to the lion. Poor thing, being put in isolation, just for being a lion.
Not that I think the park is all that great. 20 acres for 85 lions? Our cows had more acreage than that.
We saw lions at some distance in several parks. The scariest encounter, however, was with lions we never saw.
At Samburu, we camped one night at a designated camp site, which we assumed for that reason was reasonably safe. However, the nearby river was teeming with big Nile Crocs and a pile of elephant dung nearby suggested that they came by sometimes as well.
We pitched our tents, made our dinner, and went to bed. An hour or two after dark we heard a huge battle royal break out between a pride of lions and a pack of hyenas a couple hundred yards away. I thought about making a break for the vehicle, but decided it was better to stay in the tent and not risk attracting attention. Needless to say, none of us got much sleep that night.
It’s amazing how many people ignore the safety warnings in parks like these.
Check out the great parenting and the Darwin Award candidate kids in this video.
See how quickly that lion went from lying down to a semi-threatening pose? If he had really wanted to attack, he probably could have been at that car window and had a kid in his jaws before they even had time to get their heads halfway back into the car. There’s no way they could have got the window up before he got his head in the car.
In the U.S. and probably other countries the authorities would’ve killed the lion, because, you know, can’t encourage eating humans. Or, like, public opinion demands revenge.
I shouldn’t post when I am suffering from sinus issues because it squeezes my brain and I don’t think things through. I am the type of person who thinks about everything that can go wrong and how to prepare for that. When talking about a lion park I tried to think about how I would set things up and I definitely would not let people drive themselves or use their own vehicles, so I just figured that’s how it was done.
Here’s the main issues I see with these types of parks;
Never underestimate the power of humans to be utterly stupid in the face of danger and possible death.*
Never underestimate the power and speed of a large** wild carnivorous animal because you are made of tasty, tasty meat.
*Even zoos with all sorts of safety protocols have had incidents that can usually all be attributed to Stupid People Tricks; forgetting to close gates, dropping kids in enclosures, crazy people jumping into enclosures, sticking hands through fencing - just to name a few.
**you should probably be extra careful around the small ones, too.
For some reasons this reminds me of going through a self-drive safari park back in the late 70s or early 80s, northern Ohio, some place close to the Mecca that was Cedar Point amusement park. I’m not sure if they had lions, and I’m still not sure how dangerous giraffes truly our, but I certainly remember a large one getting his head completely inside our Buick Electra and his tongue inside our bag of Doritos.
There was also an angry ape that lived on an island in the walking part of the part. I’m guessing he didn’t like being looked at all that much, judging by his feces he was throwing. My friend and I (being stupid kids) started throwing rocks back, and no one came to stop us. I imagine that today we would have been arrested.