The Only Cat in This Atlas That Lives in a Family Group

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Every other big cat in this atlas hunts and lives alone. The lion does not. The Smithsonian's National Zoo describes a pride as a group of related females, who do the great majority of the hunting, joined by one or more resident males and by cubs and sub-adults between two and four years old, together numbering anywhere from a handful up to forty individuals. Relatedness runs through the mothers, not the fathers: females typically stay in the pride they were born into for their entire lives, unless a shortage of prey forces them to leave, while young males are pushed out of their birth pride between the ages of two and four, precisely because they are old enough to start competing with the dominant males for the position. What actually sets the size of a pride, the zoo notes, is less about territory and more about how much prey the surrounding land can support, so a pride is really a hunting cooperative sized to its food supply as much as it is a family. Lions once ranged across Africa, into the Middle East and across large parts of Asia. Today the zoo places wild lions almost entirely in Africa, from the southern edge of the Sahara down to northern South Africa, with one narrow exception: a small, separately struggling population of the Asiatic subspecies survives in the Gir Forest of northwest India.