52min x 4epis
Pride: the honor entertained by only 5% of the total number of male lions.
Lions mostly live in prides. A group of 1-3 young males and 10 females is called a Pride.
When a male lion turns 2, the father lion starts to check on him.
The male lion is kicked out of the pride with male siblings and male cousins.
They live independently for a year or two. Freshly independent lions lack hunting skills. This is because female lions (mother or aunts) were in charge of hunting in the group. So the first difficulty that an independent male lion meets is hunger, not enemies or rivals.
The nomadic male lions that left the group eat rotten meat left over from others or steal meat from hyenas, cheetahs, and leopards. The beginning of the wandering life is a terrible experience of hunting failures and theft of others’ food.
In an ordinary pride, the male lion spends 20 hours a day sleeping or resting. On the other hand, lionesses hunt all day long. The reason why female lions are responsible for to hunting is because they are not able to protect their cubs from predators such as hyenas and leopards due to their smaller bodies. Therefore, large male lions keep their cubs safe. When a male lion is full, he rests without movement for 24 hours. Sometimes he rests in one spot without moving for three to four days. However, if he is hungry, he may travel 24km in search of food. Most of the long-distance travel takes place at night. Such movements of male lions are tracked with a specially crafted AI-powered vehicle.
There is only a 30% chance that a cub will survive until it becomes an adulthood. Most are attacked by strangers or hyenas or die of hunger and injury. The wandering males, accustomed to a drifting life, hunt together for large herbivores like buffalo. When male lions learn to hunt, they become more likely to survive in their environment and win the throne of the kingdom of animals.
When a male lion turns four, it is the time to form a pride as it is in the most vigorous time in his life.
A wandering male lion who enters another lion’s territory challenges and fights against him. In general, the numerically superior side wins.
Through such repetitive fighting, the lion learns the skills of fighting.
Lions that have had to fight frequently sometimes form a coalition and fight together against external forces. So, a group of lions between two and four years old are united in a sticky brotherhood, seizing a pride led by other male lions in a joint attack, and then live with them afterwards. No matter how powerful the lion leading the pride is, it is difficult to keep the pride for more than five years.
When a new male lion takes control of a pride, the first thing he does is kill all of the cubs of the old leader. From a human’s perspective, it looks cruel, but it is necessary because estrus comes to the lionesses who have lost their young cubs after some time. As breastfeeding females do not have a mating season, the newcomer should kill all cubs in the group to have his own children. This is how the male lion produces his offspring. There should only be his children who inherit his genes. Because of this, when the male lion of a pride changes, the cubs that have grown enough to hunt leave the pride. Cubs that have not grown enough may run away with their mom or are killed by the new male lion. Rarely do they live together until they grow up enough to leave the group without being killed. Such cases are extremely rare. This is how lions take control of their organization.
Even when the roaming male meets a group led by an older lion and he becomes the new leader of the pride, it is not the end of the story. He must defend his pride from new challengers who may appear at any time, and also protect them from hyenas and cheetahs that target the young cubs while the females are hunting. The right to eat first when the females have hunted is, in fact, the price for the safety he provides.
He mates with the females in the group that he has conquered 30 to 50 times a day for approximately for 15 minutes each time to leave his genes. In order to have a lion and raise it to adulthood, on average, the male lion must mate more than 3,000 times. It is said that the reason why it is difficult for lions to conceive is because the number of lions has declined, and the inbreeding of lions has weakened them.
Mating is the right to pursue his happiness of the male lion that has built a pride.
All episodes of the male lion's pride conquest process will be recorded on CASAD.
