"Once Upon A Time In India"
"Once Upon A Time In India"
2020
Asiatic Lion (Panthera leo persica) and Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris tigris)
The meeting of our world's two supercats, the Tiger and the Lion, likely has not occurred in the wild for a couple of centuries, but it has stirred our collective imagination since antiquity, and continues to do so today. Though the historic range of Asiatic Lions did overlap with that of Caspian Tigers in parts Central Asia and the Middle East, and with Bengal Tigers in parts of India, I actually believe encounters and competition would have remained fairly limited by habitat preferences. The Tiger is essentially a forest predator, and the Lion prefers open, drier terrain. When they did meet, they would have done so in transitional zones, where grasslands and bushlands merged into dry forests.
A fight could go either way depending on each individual animal's size, fitness and temperament. But most historical and contemporary records, opinions of big cat experts, and my personal views, favor the larger, more powerful Tiger. In any case, I've always thought a bit silly to waste so much energy arguing over which animal would beat the other in a fight, as if they were dueling monsters in a movie or wrestling champions in an arena, and conservationists and experts tend to share in that view. There's a whole lot more that makes these animals amazing than just their fighting capabilities, and their coexisting in the wild is interesting beyond the question of who would win in a fight.
Though still threatened on many fronts, Bengal Tigers and Asiatic Lions have grown in numbers and are beginning to outgrow their sanctuaries in India, with one Tiger recently wandering into the state of Gujarat, the only place in the world where Asiatic Lions reside. Only the future will tell if this scene will one day happen again, or if it will remain a picture of the past.
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