[Leica] lions and elephants

[benedenia at gmail.com (Marty Deveney)]

This kind of emotive commentary:
>Lions are among the animal kingdom?s most brutal and efficient predators
might sell, but it is inaccurate at best.  Brutality is a human
concept; lions just do what they do to eat and stay alive.  Most
studies show their hunting success, like that of many large predators,
is surprisingly low.  They are 'sufficient' not 'efficient'.  I like
lions, but I prefer cheetahs, they're more, er, approachable, to be
simple about it.  This:
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/75+Summilux/  gives you
some idea how easy cheetahs are to get close to.  When it had breath,
this one was hissing at me like an overgrown house cat.

I saw the Chobe elephant-eating pride in August, but they weren't
hunting elephants at the time.  There are certainly very large
populations of elephants and lions in Chobe.  Behavioural adaptation
is common in animals, people just appear to enjoy the literal enormity
of these kinds of events.

Marty