Who’s King of the Jungle Now? Watch a Porcupine Fight Off 17 Lions

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.takepart.com/video/2014/11/05/porcupine-fights-off-17-lions?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2014-11-05

The critter holds its own against a family of hungry cats.

November 05, 2014 By Kristina Bravo

Kristina Bravo is Assistant Editor at TakePart.


Video: http://www.takepart.com/video/2014/11/05/porcupine-fights-off-17-lions?cmpid=longtailshare


Behold the pluck of a prickly critter.

A video recorded at a South African park shows a porcupine fending off a pride of lions. Lucien Beaumont, a guide at Londolozi Private Game Reserve, captured the encounter while observing the pride and four additional male lions (which are usually solitary).

“We saw the group clump together and it looked like they were surrounding something of interest,” Beaumont wrote on the reserve’s blog. “To my surprise it was a rather unfortunate porcupine…. This is not an ideal place to be, especially if [you’re featured] on the menu of a lion!”

The porcupine began shaking its tail as the lions approached. Contrary to popular belief, the prickly rodents can’t shoot quills—the sharp objects attach to a predator’s skin or paw if it comes in contact.

FULL story at link.

[Archae]

1. Those lions must have been desperately hungry.

At all other times they leave porcupines alone.

Now if it was a honey badger...
(I think it would have been having lion for lunch!)

[Divernan]

2. Lions on endangered species list; could be extinct in 2 decades.

None of the lions got hurt, but they eventually wandered off into the night and left the porcupine to live another day.

Humans don’t respond to the threat of the apex predators as well as porcupines. In Tanzania, some still hunt lions because they threaten livestock and humans. Conservation groups like Niassa Lion Project are working to reduce lion invasions and increase locals' tolerance of the beasts. In September, the only adult male lion in Zambia’s Liuwa Plain National Park was killed under suspicious circumstances.

Lions could be extinct in the wild within two decades. With the number left in the world down from 450,000 in the 1950s to fewer than 20,000 today, the species was recently placed on the endangered species list.

[MisterP]

3. but wild mammals have us surrounded!