Posted on 06/04/2016 11:34:14 PM PDT by nickcarraway
If you own a cat, you know that they crouch down and pounce while playing.
The same thing was caught on tape, but with a much larger cat - a 400 pound lion at a zoo in Chiba, Japan.
A two-year-old boy got a very close encounter when the lion lunged, after the boy turned his back.
The good news is that a glass wall was separating the two when the lion pounced, smashing his face into the wall.
The glass wall is only about a month old, allowing lions to see their human visitors more closely than ever before.
Zookeepers say the lion acts similarly each time he sees a small child, and simply wants to play with them.
Do you think the lion was just playing?
Either way, it's a good thing that glass wall is thick!
Meanwhile, at a Belgium zoo, the birth of a baby panda, which looks more like a hairless rat, is being called a miracle.
Just three months after announcing that mother panda Hao Hao was inseminated, she was seen carrying her tiny newborn cub in her mouth.
Officials at Pairi Daiza Zoo say less than 2,000 pandas remain in the wild, and that panda births in captivity are very rare.
Finally, an orphaned baby gorilla at the Louisville Kentucky Zoo is searching for a new mom.
3-month-old Kindi weighs just six-and-a-half pounds.
Her mother died during her birth, so zookeepers wear a furry gorilla vest while feeding and playing with Kindi, .
"She's reaching a lot of milestones. She has two teeth now, and we wear a furry vest all the time, and we're trying to have her learn what it's like to be a gorilla," said Zoo Assistant Mammal Curator Jill Kakta.
The zoo staff stays with Kindi 24 hours a day, hoping that one of their female gorillas can soon become her surrogate mom.
We went to a fundraiser when my youngest was 2 and a tiger was present. He was chained, but when my little one walked by the tiger started pacing. The handler told me to take my daughter away. She explained that the little one was “prey size.”
We need higher life form to design our zoos.
It is well known that cats play with their food. Anyone who thinks that the lion was “playing” is an idiot, especially since the cat pounced AFTER the child turned away.
Kitty wanted a snack. A glass wall got in the way.
You caught that too. The lion was crouching and waited until AFTER the child had turned away before lunging and note even after the face plant the lion was doing everything in its power to claw its way to its prey. He wasn’t playing, he wanted to attack and eat the child. They don’t call them wild animals for nothing.
I saw my sweet kitty, Beanie, notice a rat walking across our back lawn about ten feet from our deck. Suddenly, there was a leap. It was a serious leap. It was a ten foot leap; like a Superman leap. In one bound Beanie was on him. The rat tried to run but Beanie put his mouth right on his neck and bit down hard and shook that Rat real hard. This was not a playful bite. I heard a high pitch squeal and the Rad went limp. Beanie brought that dead Rat right up to the deck and laid his prize right at my feet. “Good Beanie!” I said. I think about it as a metaphor for how the Republicans will handle the Rats this November. They need a strong bite in the neck until they are dead. “Good Donald!” I will say.
Love the story, and I pray we both say ‘good Donald’ later this year.
from your lips to Trump’s ear!!
Do you think the lion was just playing? …Sure. In the same way that Felis catus plays with birds and mice.
Bump for later.
Camera catches pictures.....
So,where are the pictures?
A lion’s definition of play is somewhat different from a person’s, but they aren’t going to hitting the glass unless it’s fun.
thumbs up!! lol
LOL...
Mr. Lion thought his dinner bell had rung....
My cats always play with a mouse before they eat it.
Not my Dad. He was too frugal to let good meat just go to waste. He brought them home for the family cats to "play" with.
Why would anyone be surprised at this behavior?
A friend and his wife are boarding a teenager who was blinded as child by a large cat (tiger, etc.) his father kept in their home.
The management of this “zoo” requires replacement, and the “exhibit” requires redesign to make this sort of lunging impracticable. They are exploiting the lion’s prey drive to create a spectacle for public entertainment, at the risk of injury to the lion (and if it gets loose, of course the lion will be shot, not the zookeepers).
Big cats always eyeball children at zoos; they aren’t thinking about play, except the kind that precedes a meal, and the zookeepers know it. Tormenting a lion by parading tender morsels that close is inhumane and cynical.
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