You don’t often stop to consider what it’s like for a wild animal to be a first-time mum.
‘new-mum chaos’ is not exclusively a human phenomenon
We tend to assume instincts will swoop in, take the wheel and handle everything flawlessly, but while filming season two of Big Cats 24/7, following a young lioness called Serami, we quickly discovered that ‘new-mum chaos’ is not exclusively a human phenomenon. In fact, Serami could have had her own parenting reality show, and we would’ve watched every episode.
Serami’s timing wasn’t ideal. The Xudum Pride was splintering just as she gave birth, with older, wiser females drifting off and leaving the younger lionesses to figure things out solo. And if there’s one thing we learned, it’s that lion society is the backbone of lion survival. ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ becomes, in lion terms, ‘it takes a pride to stop everything going terribly, terribly wrong.’