There is a lot going on here.
Not many animals have a leg up on the leopard, but lions would be one of them.
Male lions grow to around 10 feet in length and weigh up to 550 pounds, while females tend to top out around 9 feet and 395 pounds. In their own right, leopards are pretty big, clocking in around 6 feet long and up to 165 pounds, but that’s still a far cry from the King of the Jungle.
One way I thought leopards would have an advantage on lions would be in the climbing department. Not only are they smaller and more agile, they’ve demonstrated just how adept they are at climbing multiple times by carrying a rhino calf and an impala high up into the trees to protect them from scavenging predators.
But it turns out, lions are pretty dang good climbers too, which we can see in this video that I assume was taken somewhere in southern Africa.
Tourists on a safari got to witness an incredible sight when a leopard was spotted high up in a tree with a kill, but it wasn’t just the tourists that noticed. A female lioness also saw the potential meal dangling high in the tree branches and scampered up to the top to try and wrestle it away from the leopard.
In a fight that was brief but incredibly intense, the lion and leopard have it out, deep growls echoing across the land while the tree branch bounded wildly under them as they moved further and further out. Unfortunately for them, the combined weight of the creatures caused the limb to break and they tumbled some 30 feet straight down onto the ground.
As the saying goes, both cats landed on their feet and the leopard darted away to live another day while lioness shook off the fall and prepared to collect her reward.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time. Those people just better hope the lioness doesn’t want some fresher meat and notice them standing nearby.
They’d be in for a world of trouble.
