Would a lion typically rescue any lion surrounded by hyenas?

[fourthindiana]

I just watched an interesting video clip on youtube which shows a lion, Red, surrounded by 20 hyenas. The lion Red had foolishly wandered off from his pride of lions alone. Then a pack of 20+ hyenas surrounded Red. The narrator says "This number of hyenas could kill him [Red]. It is impossible to fight them all at once." The 20 hyenas attempted to bite Red from multiple directions. A lion named Tatu came to the rescue of the Red. The narrator said "Red's ally Tatu has heard the commotion." Tatu ran to aid Red. The narrator continued, " Now the odds have changed. Even for 20 hyenas, a pair of male lions is too much to take on." The hyenas gave up on killing Red and retreated.

When the narrator described Tatu as Red's ally, that sounds to me like Red and Tatu knew each other before Red encountered the 20 hyenas. But it could just be that Red and Tatu did not previously know each other, and the narrator just described Tatu as Red's ally because Tatu rescued Red.

Here is a link to the video clip:

I figure a lion would not rescue any adult lion, not even a lion from his own pride, if the lion thought that the situation was futile.

I would like to bring up a hypothetical situation to learn about lions. Let's say that there is a male lion that is surrounded by 20 hyenas that want to kill the lion, but the lion has not been hurt severely and it's not too late to rescue the lion. If there is an onlooking male lion sees that a pack of 20 hyenas has surrounded another male lion, but the onlooking male lion that observes this is from a different pride than the threatened male lion and the onlooking male lion does not know the threatened male lion at all, would the onlooking male lion typically come to the rescue of the threatened male lion just because the threatened male lion is a lion also? Or would a male lion not typically rescue another lion unless the threatened lion is from the same pride?

 

[jedishrfu]

There is no way to analyze this without pure speculation using human notions of compassion and altruism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism

What you view as one lion rescuing another may actually be one lion joining the hunt started by another lion since lions do hunt in packs and mostly likely these two lions came from the same pride.

Then there’s the gene view with the lions working together to defeat a common enemy where lions who did this in past generations survived to sire lion cubs who have the same trait.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolution

Some time ago, George Price investigated altruism to understand it workings and developed the Price equation that predicts the prevalence of altruism in a group of individuals based on genetic disposition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_equation_examples

The fact that he was able to develop this equation so disturbed him and he sought to disprove it through acts of kindness throughout his life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Price

There is a book on his life entitled The Price of Altruism available on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393339998/?tag=pfamazon01-20

I’ve covered enough to show that you can’t simply speculate on this alone. You would need to do detailed observations of many lion prides to see if this was a common trait or if there was some other reason for the second lion to help the first.

I think it’s time to close this thread now.