The Social Lives of Animals by Ashley Ward

Author:Ashley Ward [Ward, Ashley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Blood’s Thicker Than Water

Co-operation among relatives is often the secret to success for carnivore clans

A roaring success

It’s my first night in Africa and I’m lying in a banda, a traditional circular hut, listening to animals who, like me, aren’t sleeping. I’m on red alert. My fellow occupants of the banda, two other researchers, arrived before me and very wisely chose the beds away from the window. My head is right next to the open window. It has bars on it, but no glass, and that’s not enough to reassure me. The bars won’t stop an adventurous baboon reaching through to tousle my hair; nor will they stop an enterprising leopard from reaching through to reconfigure my face. The generator has been switched off for the night and all is darkness. The only sounds are those that drift in through the window. Here, in the central Kenyan bush, those sounds are all made by animals. There are hoots, cackles, grunts and yaps alongside the rustlings of vegetation and breaking twigs. These are all new to me and entirely unfamiliar. I decide that the cackles belong to hyenas, and I’m excited because I’m desperate to see these misunderstood and fascinating animals. And then I hear another sound – one that needs absolutely no introduction. It’s primaeval, stirring feelings deep inside me. Even though it’s distant, the sound of a lion’s roar in the darkness is stunning, unique, terrifying. It transports my mind instantly to a book I read describing the man-eating lions of Tsavo, not a million miles from where I lie. Over a period of several months in 1898, a pair of lions terrorised a camp of workers building a bridge over the River Tsavo. Under the cover of darkness, the lions would steal into the camp to seize and carry off their screaming victims from their tents. Something like thirty workers were taken to their deaths until the lions’ reign of terror was ended by John Patterson, a British army officer in charge of the railway project, who kept a nightly vigil from a platform by the camp. The lions were tenacious, though – one of them was shot six times before it succumbed. With this thought in my head, there’s no way I’m going out to the toilet block tonight.

It’s tempting to ascribe my visceral response to the lion as some echo of my ancestors. There was once a time when lions could be found not only throughout Africa, but also in Southern Europe and across the Middle East into Asia as far as India. Its extinct relative, the cave lion, was widespread throughout Europe; remains were even found in the 1950s during excavations under Trafalgar Square. Many generations ago, my forebears lived alongside these animals, and they didn’t have bars on their windows. While there are relatively few animals who might regard humans as prey, lions are potentially one such. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I reacted to the lion’s roar after all. Despite this, I can’t help

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