The Plight of the Carnivore
We pull up in the jeep, my legs exposed at 6 feet of distance from a female lion with stark yellow eyes, passively crouching in the tall grass. “This one — her name is Killing Machine,” says our expert guide. Oh, Killing Machine…fantastic.
The guides of the Busanga Plains in Kafue National Park, Zambia, have a remarkable ability to memorize the different lions, hence the endearing names. As some of the other lionesses had less intimidating names such as “Princess” and “Yaya” it was safe to assume Killing Machine probably earned her name through practical demonstration. As it turned out, however, she was having a slow day. The poor girl was pregnant and tired.
When watching nature documentaries I’ve always rooted for the herbivores to escape the (very literal) jaws of death. But tracking the lionesses as they went hungry some days with their cubs waiting in the bushes for their next blood meal, for the first time I sincerely found myself contemplating the plight of the carnivore. Antelope and other grazing animals need not worry where their next meal will come from. Hunting, however, is not easy. In fact, it can be a matter of life and death — for the predator. The Busanga plains, in particular, present an unforgiving terrain for the hunters. The antelope like to graze way out in the open where their natural predators cannot hide and stalk too close before moving in for the kill. That is where more experienced (or desperate) lions might attempt to go for the more dangerous game. Our guide had told us that just the week before we arrived at the camp, he witnessed a male lion and his guts fly into the air after being impaled by the horns of a Cape buffalo. He laughed as he told the story, not out of sick amusement, but from amazement of the absurdity of witnessing such a thing.
As we pulled away in the jeep, Killing Machine still lying there with a belly full of cubs depending on her to live up to her name, I contemplated the cruel inevitability of nature. The lion did not ask to be a carnivore; the impala did not ask to be an herbivore. But the cycles continue, and animals simply exist in them without questioning. In that moment, I felt a shred of gratitude for being mostly removed from this primal dynamic — and shuddered at the thought of how easy it would be to join it by merely setting foot on the ground.
