“Mostly lions die because they kill each other,” Craig Packer told me, in response to a question about fatalities. “The number one cause of death for lions, in an undisturbed environment, is other lions.” He broke that into categories. At least 25 percent of cub loss is owed to infanticide by incoming males. Females too, given the chance, will sometimes kill cubs from neighboring prides. They will even kill another adult female, he said, if she unwisely wanders into their ambit. Resources are limited, prides are territorial, and “it’s a tough ’hood out there.” Males operate just as jealously. “Male coalitions are gangs, and if they find a strange male that’s hitting on their ladies, they’ll kill him.” And males will kill adult females if it suits their purposes, as the Killers had shown. You see a lot of bite wounds on lions, reflecting the competitive struggle for food, territory, reproductive success, sheer survival. With luck, the wounds heal. Less luck, and the loser is killed in a fierce leonine battle, or he limps away, losing blood, maybe crippled, maybe destined to die slowly of infection or starvation. “So the lion is the number one enemy of lions,” Packer said. “It’s why, ultimately, lions live in groups.” Holding territory is crucial, and the best territorial locations—places he calls hot spots, such as stream confluences, where prey tend to become concentrated—serve as incentive for social cooperation. “The only way you can monopolize one of those very valuable and very scarce hot spots,” he says, thinking like a lion, is as “a gang of like-sexed companions who work as a unit.” ”
