A lioness in a zoo in Leipzig, Germany showed humans exactly what she thought about the ideology of motherly love when she ate her two cubs two days after she birthed them. And this lioness, named Kigali, apparently ate the cubs for the sake of eating them. She was not hungry. She is regularly fed. She does not have to hunt to make ends meet. She only has to stand around and be seen by humans for their enjoyment. Kigali apparently made a point of really eating these cubs. There was nothing left of them when she was done. “Because Kigali ate the cubs in their entirety, an autopsy cannot be performed on them to determine whether they were ill, which may have triggered their mother’s actions,” reports CNN.
The zoo’s spokesperson, Maria Saegebarth, told CNN that “this is a kind of natural behavior as it happens in nature, too.” That’s certainly one way of making sense of the “shocking” and “sad” incident. She’s a lion, which means she is ruled by the blood-dripping laws of tooth-and-claw. You can take the big cat out of the jungle, but you can never take the jungle out of the big cat. This is the human attempting to accept (come to terms with) the perspective of a brute. But what if the human took the flat perspective of the human-as-animal? Most would immediately call this framing anthropomorphising, and reject it outright. And how can we blame them? One only has to look at the movie The Lion King to see the non-stop absurdities of making lions and other animals exactly like humans.
Nevertheless, the wholesale rejection of anthropomorphism makes the mistake of conflating an anthromophosizing which is impoverished (The Lion King), and one that is really rich. The former does not see the animal in the human, the latter does. If the animal (or mammal) in the human and the lion are connected, then we are not just freed from the poverty of the jungle laws logic but can also recognize, as a bonus (and added richness), the significance of Toni Morrison’s recent death to this sad zoo story.
Now, the underlying assumption that the lioness ate her cubs because it’s in her nature, rather than her situation, is that lions, as a whole, cannot differentiate life in the wild from life in captivity. For a lion, it has to be all the same. In this situation (the jungle), it is hunting for meat; in this other situation (zoo), it’s provided by a human. The mental capacity of the lion, according to this view (which sees itself as the negative of anthropomorphism), is so feeble that both situations (free/not free) are to it identical. But the human has the mental capacity to make this discernment. It knows what freedom is, even if it is not born free. The mind of the human is of a much higher grade of awareness than that which we find in animals trapped in zoos.
But if we anthropomorphize in a rich way (animal-to-animal), we can see similarities between the lioness’s destruction of her cubs in the Leipzig zoo to the main character in Toni Morrison’s most famous novel Beloved? (RIP, Morrison.) Based on a true story, the 1987 book is about an escaped slave, Sethe, who attempted to kill all of her children when her master found her and her children and wanted to return them to his plantation, Sweet Home. Sethe’s reasoning: Slavery is so bad that it’s better to be dead. She succeeds in killing only one of her children, her two-year-old daughter (chainsaw to the toddler’s neck). She did this not out of hate but a love that’s so profound that it upset the natural order of the world.
We’re revisiting this @Sheridan_Arts story from the archives with the news of #ToniMorrison‘s death: https://t.co/0q1YbMTGhG Bachelor of Illustration program coordinator @JoeMorseDraws was commissioned by @foliosociety to illustrate Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved pic.twitter.com/9h7ZiA8MAE
— Sheridan News (@NewsSheridan) August 6, 2019
The lioness in Leipzig killed all of her cubs.
Now, those who believe that their view of the very bloody incident represents the lion’s perspective, will say: this sort of thing happens now and then in nature and in captivity. But if we read the lioness’s story in the terms of Beloved, we do not get anything like the nature story or the The Lion King one. We instead see an incident that’s deeply disturbing to humans. These animals know what’s happening to them. They know what a zoo is. They are like us. They want out.
