Over the past day (20th July 2023), social media accounts have been sharing a brief snippet of mobile phone footage purporting to show a lion (specifically, a lioness) walking at the edge of woodland in the Berlin suburb of Kleinmachnow…
Caption: screengrab of the ‘Kleinmachnow lion’ footage.
Based on what I’ve seen on social media (predominantly Twitter) and international news, the police are taking this quite seriously and have told people to stay indoors. I haven’t seen the name of the photographer get any mention or credit, but one news article states that observers saw the animal catch and kill a wild boar. Those familiar with weird animal reports will know that ‘escaped lions’ appear fairly often in the global media, the usual story being that the animal is a suspected escapee from a zoo, circus or private collection. Said animal usually turns out to be misidentified house cat or even a pet dog.
In this case, the ‘lion’ definitely isn’t a lion. Look at these montages I knocked up…
But if the animal isn’t a lion, what is it? My initial thought was young cow. But cows generally have a very horizontal dorsal border to the spine and don’t put as much curve into the spine as the Kleinmachnow animal does in the footage. There are boar in the area, so could it be one of them? That’s not a bad idea: my initial response to this was that boars have a comparatively short, slender tail that isn’t tipped with a large brush, but this isn’t true across all individuals. Some do indeed have such a tail. Boars can also put this sort of curvature into the spine when foraging, and the ear shape is right too. If this identification is right, this must be a pale boar, presumably a young one. This would also explain the high-set position of the ears and comparatively large head.
Caption: young European wild boar photographed on a street in Rome, from this article at The Guardian. Image: (c) Gregorio Borgia/AP.
The report of the animal “killing a boar” could be an embellished or confused observation of it interacting with other boars.
So that’s what I think. What do you think?
