On April 28, my guide found Laura in almost exactly the same spot where we had left her three days earlier. Suddenly, we heard the "distress call" of a cub, a lion cub crying for help, from a bush behind Laura, to which Laura reacts immediately. Moments later she reappeared with a tiny baby in her mouth and that's when I started filming.
By licking it with her rough tongue, Laura wants to provoke a reaction or even reflexes from the baby. This snarling of the teeth, in turn, is referred to by zoologists as "flehmen". Laura tries to sniff out for specific odors that move past her palate into the so-called "vomeronasal" organ, where the molecules she inhales can both be smelled and tasted.
Whatever Laura feels or smells or tastes; she interprets it negatively - to the horror of the guides present and especially their clients, she begins to eat her baby from the head.
What we don't realize until I watch the footage on a bigger monitor: the baby was still alive when Laura started to eat it. Even without slow motion, I noticed at least two or three moments when the tiny creature was ever so slightly moving. For me personally it is hard to imagine that these were just convulsions from an already dead animal. But if I were actually right, then the kitten's death would be doubly sad; another tragedy in the life of Laura the lioness, a life that is not lacking in tragedies anyway.
main footage filmed by Hamisi Masawe
addt'l footage provided by KopeLion(dot)org