Lady Liuwa
I stunned to come across an amazing documentary this morning.
Last night, I was watching the Turtleman and (Not) Finding Bigfoot, so I left it on Animal Planet when I went to bed.
When I decided to turn the television on this morning, I noticed that the new incarnation of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom was on, and I decided to watch just a few minutes of it.
The animal in question was a lioness, the last survivor of her pride that had been massacred by poachers in the Liuwa Plain National Park in Zambia. That pride was the last one in the park, and she was the only member of her species for hundreds of miles.
The documentary focused upon a wildlife filmmaker named Herbert Brauer. He was interested in documenting how a single lioness might survive on her own.
So the footage showed her killing small antelope, and then the spotted hyenas would show up and steal it from her.
But then something strange started to happen.
She began to approach the vehicle that the filmmaker and his crew were using.
She began to roll over next to the vehicle, which in lion-speak is a way of saying that she seeks company.
And during the wet season when prey was more plentiful, she would kill something just to have the hyenas come by and steal it. Maybe she was trying to make friends with the hyenas, but hyenas aren’t terribly disposed to making friends with lions. They merely took her kills and ran off.
She was revealing the Brauer just exactly how social lions really are.
We often hear how important companionship is for lions, but I’ve always been a bit skeptical of that claim. I remember reading somewhere that the main reason why lions form prides in the first place is so that the females can be more easily guarded by coalitions of pride males, thereby preventing pride takeovers by outside males who then kill all the cubs in order to bring the lionesses back into estrus.
I was always skeptical that the prides meant that much to lions. It always seemed to me to be something that lions have only recently developed. I’ve seen footage of lions fighting so fiercely over carcasses that they wind up killing their own cubs that just happened to be in the way.
After a few years of filming this lioness, who was given then name “Lady Liuwa,” she decided to take the relationship to the next level.
One night she followed Brauer to his camp and just sat outside and watched him.
She wound up coming by every other night. There was no food in camp, and she never offered to stalk Brauer or anyone else.
She just longed for company.
For safety purposes, Brauer never let her come any closer than 15 feet. Even though she was a friendly lioness, she still had all her instincts and lethal teeth and claws.
It was when started doing this that Brauer really began to understand how lonely she was. It was at this time that he began to work with authorities to get a male lion brought in to be Lady Liuwa’s companion.
The first captured male lion died on his way to the park, but the second attempt, which brought in two maturing male lions, was quite successful. They joined up with Lady Liuwa, and she was no longer alone.
She had a pride once again.
The documentary was made in 2009, and I wondered what has happened since.
It turns out that she is still alive and doing quite well. A blog and a Youtube channel are now devoted to her.
But the story of Lady Liuwa raises some important questions for me.
I have long been fascinated with the questions surrounding dog domestication, and I’ve found a lot of the literature on dog domestication somewhat lacking, mainly because too many experts reach for overly reductionist answers for these questions.
One of the best books to come out in recent years on the subject is Mark Derr’s How the Dog Became the Dog.
He posits a very complex scenario for how dogs became domesticated, and it has to be complex. The evidence that has accumulated through a wide variety of disciplines suggests that dog domestication had to have been a very complex process.
One part that Derr points out has been entirely left out of the discussion:
Were some wolves just wanting human company?
Wolves are more intensely social than lions are, and it would make sense that there might be a few wolves that somehow found themselves on their own that tried to seek out humans for companionship.
Maybe these lonely wolves played some role in dog domestication.
The story of Lady Liuwa is the story of what lengths social animals will go to in order to seek companionship.
Maybe something like this happened with a young wolf that dispersed from its natal pack.
Maybe it couldn’t find a mate anywhere, or maybe its initial mate had been killed.
And then it saw something in the roving bands of hunter-gatherers that made it think:
“Maybe I can trust them. Maybe we can be friends.”
I agree that, as you and Mr. Derr have often postulated, the answer will not be simple. Domestication probably took place multiple times in multiple places and times, and in various ways.
But people, being binary thinkers at heart, will always look for THE answer rather than for a suite of complementary answers to questions like this.
I think that’s true. Domestication was not a linear process. People have always associated socially with various types of wild animals, and have kept a stunning range of wildlife species simply as pets over the millennia. Sometimes this is the result of the humans taking a wild animal captive, or taking the young from the nest or den. Other times, the association is at the initiative of the animal itself. This latter happens much more often than we realize; it’s usually just a cause for local or a familial anecdote. Now that worldwide, instantaneous electronic communication is nearly universal, we’ll hear about more instances of this. The incidents aren’t necessarily more common than they’ve ever been, but more people will learn of them.
good thoughts on this, retrieverman, and good post from you too massugu, imo.
You know I have the kind of dogs that will tell you to piss off if they’re busy and not interested in interested in interacting with you. But they will still, in the middle of summer when it’s almost a hundred in the house, lie by my feet while I work on the computer. They could be outside where it is cooler, and there is dirt to lie in, but they choose to be with me. They don’t want attention or interaction, they just want to be in company.
That was one of the most beautiful documentary that I have ever seen. And I saw it last summer. I saw it from start to finish and my tea kept getting cold, because I was so engrossed. I would get up during each break and warm it up only to see it getting cold again by the next sip.
A wolf seeking man’s company reminds me of Kevin Costner’s movie ‘Dances with wolves’. Yes, wolves becoming early dogs in this manner is entirely possible.
Very interesting.
Won’t wolves when isolated from their own kind hang around with and even breed with coyotes (a animal they normally kill)leading to red wolves and eastern coyotes?
A lone young wolf maybe struggling to survive might initially be attracted to humans to feed off their kills. After a while it becomes socilised to people and starts interacting. Some time later another lone wolf of the opposite gender comes by and does the same thing! You now have tameish wolves whose pups are born around people and can become socilised to people from a young age!
Adam
Lady Liuwa has got two companions now, a male and a female lion, unfortunatly shes not mating with the male, so her genes will be lost the day she will die.
I remember reading somewhere that the main reason why lions form prides in the first place is so that the females can be more easily guarded by coalitions of pride males, thereby preventing pride takeovers by outside males who then kill all the cubs in order to bring the lionesses back into estrus.
I would be very skeptical of such a claim. Bluntly, it’s only stated from the point of view of male power, which has been found to be an outmoded *human* sexist assumption on the part of the researchers. Everywhere where humans have assumed males of some species are unilaterally guarding and controlling females closer study has shown the situation to be far more nuanced, with females exhibiting choice, and/or other factors involved. Lions form groups because they’re more successful hunting large, powerful prey (which is an every day necessity, unlike breeding, which only occurs episodically). There’s also evidence that lions form groups because larger groups are more effective at defending territory from rival groups. This isn’t “takeover by males”, it’s group against group, with males killing adult females from rival groups:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8120000/8120712.stm
And there’s evidence that female lions also stay within large groups to obtain assistance *from other females* in guarding cubs against infanticidal males within the pride (sorry, but I can’t seem to find a link to the complete reference for the entire cited article):
http://suite101.com/article/prides-coalitions-and-infanticide-among-lions-a133515
I suspect that the reason lions form prides is a combination: control of territory, protection of cubs by the females, competitive exclusion of other males by the males, increased hunting success *and* inherent sociability.
It’s fascinating that a lioness would seek companionship outside her own species like that, however.
I am not an expert on lions.
I find cats very boring, just in general. The only ones that really get my attention are cheetahs and lynx and little obscure tropical cats.
My quibble wasn’t with your lack of detailed knowledge of lion ethology. I’m no expert either, my area is quite different, and even with the best of intentions no one can keep up with current knowledge on everything. I’m just observing that any time you run up a claim that one gender is exerting control over another it’s generally as inadequate and anthropomorphically biased as the current popular idea of dominance in dogs and wolves — i.e. on closer study the situation will prove to be considerably more nuanced and complex, and the term is being inappropriately applied. There’s a lot of inherent, unrecognized sexism in how animal behaviour is observed and explained that’s a legacy of human cultural baggage and nothing more, and the animals involved actually have quite different social and biological mechanisms at play.
But sometimes it can be accurate, especially when the male and female of this species are clearly so different from each other.
I’m not saying there isn’t some control involved, just that it’s not the only factor. In this case males in this case are joining forces with males and females for improved territorial control and for more efficient access to prey, and specifically with males in order to increase success competing with other males. The females are banding together in larger groups for those same territorial/predatory reasons, and specifically with females to cut down on infanticide from males *within the group*. But you’re still clinging to the reductionist explanation that *males* and males only are creating group cohesion to compete with other males for reproductive access to females, when it’s only part of the explanation. Males in many species typically aren’t sexually dimorphic purely to “control” or attract females, but also to compete with other males quite apart from reproductive competition. In some cases the dimorphism actually increases reproductive success by drawing the predation risk to adult males away from females and young (though not with lions, obviously).
You might want to ask yourself why you unhesitatingly accepted a “just so” story in this area, but are willing to question theories in other areas. I’m not pointing my finger here and screaming about sexism. I’m not even trying to say you’re wrong. I’m just pointing this out, because everyone to do with science has to keep an eye on what theories they accept as valid explanations which might not actually be true but accord with some of their own personal bias. It’s just part of being human, but it affects how we do science and understand the world, because we get in our own way and muddy things with wrong attributions, and other people tend to pick it up and run with it without examining it critically for themselves, and before you know it you have a complete edifice based on sand. I’ve caught *myself* doing the same thing, and I’m a professional working with wildlife, so if I screw up I’ve potentially damaged or even destroyed a local population of something we’re trying to maintain. It’s just something to be aware of.
You do a great thing with this blog, bringing increased knowledge about a fascinating array of animal topics up for people in general to enjoy. I’m just pointing out this one area where you might have been unwittingly propagating something that isn’t as correct as it could be.
And I apologize for how unsuccinct the above explanation is. I’m not a native English speaker, and sometimes it shows. I literally couldn’t convey everything I meant without meandering. Sorry about that to anyone reading. :)
To be honest with you, I think of cats as unbelievably brutal animals, when compared to dogs.
I don’t think of them as cute, even in their domestic form. Infanticide is very common in cats. Whenever the local tom is overthrown, the successor kills his kittens.
By the way, completely unrelated to this, I’ve finally worked out what was causing the problem I was having with not receiving emails about comments when I’d signed up to follow a thread. Even though I “confirmed” them individually, all of the ones which I never received email have just showed up in the interface, on they are marked “pending”. They didn’t show up before, so it’s obviously some sort of clash with WordPress’ software. If someone else has the same problem you can advise them to backtrack on their confirmation email to make certain they’ve both confirmed their subscription and selected appropriate comment threads.
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