Two instances have come under my notice of lions eating the remains of one of their own species, and I think that when hungry they would never be above such acts of cannibalism, but they would probably prefer something else, just as a shipwrecked sailor would prefer Polar bear to a steak off the comrade who had drawn the fatal lot. But with lions, as with shipwrecked sailors, necessity knows no law, and I don’t think any the worse of them because they are occasionally driven to cannibalism.
There has been much discussion as to the manner in which lions kill their prey. In ‘Wild Beasts and their Ways,’ the last of the many interesting works on travel, sport and natural history for which Englishmen are indebted to Sir Samuel Baker, that great authority says that the lion uses his paw in attack with which to deal a crushing blow in contradistinction to the tiger, which only makes use of its claws to hold its prey. Now it is always possible that in a vast continent like Africa animals of one species may develop different habits in widely separated portions of the country; but, however that may be, all my experience goes to show that, in Southern Africa, lions kill their prey very much in the same way as Sir Samuel Baker tells us tigers do in India; that is, they use their claws to hold their victim, and do the killing with their teeth. A single large male lion will sometimes kill a heavy ox or a buffalo cow, without using his teeth at all, by breaking its neck, or rather causing the frightened beast to break its own neck. Almost invariably when an ox or a buffalo has been killed by a single lion, deep claw marks will be found on the muzzle of the animal, and when that is the case, it will usually be found that the neck has been dislocated. Such animals have been killed in the following manner. We will suppose that a large heavy ox weighing 1,000 lbs. is seized by a lion, whilst grazing or walking, the attack being made from the left side. In that case the lion seizes the ox by the muzzle with its left paw, pulling its head in under it. At the same time with the extended claws of the right paw it holds its victim by the top of the shoulder, its hind feet being firmly planted on the ground. The ox plunges madly forward, and from the position in which its head is held not seeing where it is going, and hampered by the weight of the lion, soon falls, and rolling over, as often as not breaks its neck by the weight of its own body.