Lion and its Pride: The Male Lion

I did not take this photo so I do not claim this photo as my property.

Take a guess on what Disney animated movie that I still enjoy today, that involves a large group of big cats that's called a "Pride" and all the females are related? Besides Beauty and the Beast, there are also 101 Dalmatians, Rescuers: Down Under and The Jungle Book that I can't get tire of, but none of those are on my subject of what I'm going to discuss today. Of course, it's none the less, The Lion King.

The lion, or if you want to be a professional on this, you can use Panthera leo (Doesn't it sound like the panther lion when it comes down to plain meaning?), can exceed more than 250 kg (550 lb) in weight for some male lions and grow up to 10 feet (3 meters) long, including the tale. They are the second largest feline in the family, running right behind the tiger.

A lion can live up to 14 years of age in the wild, that is, if nothing much happens to them but they can live as long as 20 in captivity.

Ok, let's talk about the boys here in detail first, shall we?There's usually just only one male lion per pride, but if the numbers in the pride is too great, this lion king needs a partner or two to help him for mating, guarding and protecting the pride and its young. But sadly a male lion doesn't last a lifetime in this family, since there are younger and stronger male lions always challenging the current king. So, to answer the question to those who are wondering, the king's time is around 3 years. That means a lion reaches his prime at the age of 5 or 6 and he would "retire" at the age of 8 or 9 years old.

Unlike Simba, in the movie The Lion King, where he comes back home to Pride Rock to take his rightful place as king, a young male lion usually leaves home, mainly because his mother and the other relatives chased him away to prevent inbreeding, at the age about 2 to 2 1/2 years old to make him mature and grow up by joining up with a group of bachelors to gain experiences in life and become the king of another pride someday.

Here's something that it's called nature's course but cruel, when a male lion does defeat the previous king of the pride, he tends to kill the young cubs in order to make sure that his own cubs can live on. Survival of the fittest, so to speak.

To tell the difference between the male and the female is by the mane on the male's lion, while the female has none. The major reason why the males need the mane is because it's a protection for the head, like a helmet for a bike, from other males when they are fighting for the land, the pride and the right who mates first, that is if there are two males in a pride.