We went to Busch Gardens in Tampa FL when my daughter was about six.
We were in the lion section, inside the glassed-in visitors gallery. There were two or three lions on the other side of the glass, maybe two were maybe thirty feet away, the third was a little farther away, maybe 35 feet.
My daughter, who was standing right next to the glass, knelt down to look at a bug that was crawling on the tile floor of the enclosure. While she was looking at the bug, the farthest lion — a female — decided she looked like she’d be good to eat. That lion closed the distance to the glass in an amount of time that was so short it was incredible. No more than two seconds, maybe one and a half seconds. From a standing start.
The whole thing was perfectly silent, and she stopped with her nose an inch from the glass. She never touched the glass; she went from a full run to a dead stop in the blink of an eye. It was all very graceful, too.
My daughter was completely oblivious to the whole thing. She looked up at the female lion a couple of inches from her face and smiled at me.
I was somewhere, maybe the Living Desert Museum, and there was a warning sign, alerting people that if that type of behavior from the animals (large cats) was to occur that they should immediately remove their small children from the area and tell the staff.
“It was all very graceful, too.”
Yes, I love that about cats. How they can go from perfectly still, to speeding action, to perfectly still. They are really intense.
Funny tagline too, too true I’m afraid. I always tell my daughter that is a good, annoying song about a true, annoying truth.
Like Paul Simon’s “slip sliding away”.