Lions

A few weeks ago, Doug and I went to the zoo, using the free tickets from my dad's zoo pass. (It's strange not to have one of my own, but I guess that's what I get for moving away and then coming back so many times.) Sometime in the past two years, they opened their latest exhibit, the Elephant Odyssey, which speculates on what kind of animals might have coexisted in Southern California 10,000 years ago, and presents a biodome-like habitat where the modern descendants of those animals live side by side. (But not side by side enough to, say, eat each other.) Elephants, lions, jaguars, gazelle, condors - it would appear that all these things used to roam around San Diego before it was San Diego.

We happened to get off the escalator/walkway thing and into the exhibit in the middle of the lion keeper's talk. He had brought a toy - a giant plastic barrel - in the hopes that the pair of lions would be active and entertaining while a bunch of people were all standing there listening to him talk about them, and it worked. We watched the male lion, M'bari, batting the thing around from his perch up on a big rock, and then try to walk down the log to the ground with his toy still in his mouth. He failed ("They're not the most agile cats," the lion keeper explained. "That's why we don't see them in trees."), and as he was stumbling the last few feet down the log, the female lion, Etosha, got up from where she'd been lying, and dashed over to him - half-protectively, half-reprimanding his idiocy.

I fell in love with them immediately after that.

M'bari and Etosha were imports from a zoo in South Africa, along with four other lions, of which three are at the Wild Animal Park and one was eventually sent to another zoo in Oklahoma or somewhere, brought in to widen the gene pool of captive lions in the United States. (I know, I know - as opposed to all those wild lions in the United States.) The pair were meant to be a breeding pair, but it turned out that Etosha just wasn't destined to be a mother: her first pregnancy resulted in a C-section, with no surviving cubs; her second resulted in just one cub, stillborn, with the rest of the litter presumed to be reabsorbed early on, because, as the keeper put it, "We hardly ever see lions having just one cub at a time;" and although her third pregnancy was technically a success, with one stillborn cub and one live cub, she lost interest in her baby after just a few weeks and he began to suffer, so the keepers hand-raised him, and then integrated him with his cousins over at the Wild Animal Park. "He's doing just fine," the keeper said, "but we prefer it when mothers take care of their children." So to prevent any further disappointments, and really, for her health, they had Etosha spayed. (This story all came out as part of an explanation of why Etosha is a little overweight. Thwarted hormones, you know.) But M'bari and Etosha are still a bonded pair, and, per their keeper, still "breed" occasionally, to re-establish their connection, as well as their power dynamic.

For the rest of our afternoon at the zoo, I remained obsessed with these lions. We hadn't taken any pictures because we'd been too busy watching, so I searched the giftshop for some sort of magnet or postcard with their photo on it, to no avail. I couldn't tell Doug the whole truth about what drew me to them so intensely - their relationship, yes, but also the ridiculous connection I felt with Etosha. Finally, a fellow failed mother! Actually, I think it was the combination of the two - that this failed mother could still have a loving, playful relationship, that includes sex, even with her hormones out of whack, which is pretty incredible for an animal that - I don't believe so, anyway - isn't wired to have sex for pleasure. And no, I don't intend on abandoning my own cub, if/when I ever have one, and yes, I know I haven't been spayed, but sometimes my Mirena makes me feel like I have been. Whether subconsciously or consciously, there is a part of me that wonders what's the point of having sex when there is zero chance that it's going to serve its biological purpose.

To re-establish our connection, I guess, as well as our power dynamic.