Son,Yes Mother,I want to kill you.

A playful young lion was devoured by a lioness with frayed nerves even as its mother looked on




At first glance, it looks like a bit of rough and tumble. In a typical display of juvenile posturing in the middle of Kenya’s Masai-Mara, a young cub squares up to an adult male and lashes ineffectually with claws and teeth.
A moment of bravado later, he’s cuffed back into line by a lioness, tired of his childish antics. But the play fast deteriorates into unimaginable violence and, minutes later, the threemonth-old cub pays a terrible price for his insolence — a bloody death.
The lioness challenges one of the two dominant males — forgetting his superior size, weight and pride etiquette. The two battle it out with huge paws and razor-sharp fangs.
Finally, the furious female lashes at the cub. She claws, bites and frenziedly kills him, ripping huge chunks from his soft, furry skin as his siblings watch in shock.
Photographer Christine Denis-Huot, who with her husband Michel has studied lions in Africa for decades, said, “We have never seen anything like this in 25 years. It was very sad.”
Experts are equally stunned by the horrific behaviour. After all, lions do everything together — eat, sleep, live, breed and kill — in a pride which comprises eight to ten lionesses who stay with the group for life, and one, or two, dominant males.
Normally, the male cubs which are not dominant leave, or are forced out, when they are a few years old. But before that, they are a tightly-grouped pack and the females will do anything to protect their young.

Dr Brian Bertram, a retired zoologist and lion researcher, says for a lioness to kill a cub in this way is not known. “Infanticide is a regular practice among lions,” he says, “but only the males do it, usually when they take over a pride, to make sure their bloodline prevails. Killing the existing cubs ensures the females come back into cycle again so the male can mate with them — with cubs there, they won’t breed,” he adds.
“It doesn’t make sense for a lioness to behave so aggressively with a cub she has helped raise,” says Dr Bertram.
“It seems more like a hysterical reaction — as if the lioness has malfunctioned in some way.”
Back on the hot grass, the attack comes to a dusty, bloody end. The cub lies lifeless in the grass, the lioness throws back her massive head and, tongue lolling, mouth open wide, she looks as if she’s howling in anguish.
But the tragedy of the cub is not over yet. Still warm, but lifeless and with dripping entrails dragging through the dust, he is carried to the shade of a tree by the lioness where she sits alone before finally devouring him — while his own mother just watches and does nothing.
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mumbai mirror took this article from the daily mail.