Even though I don't know about all those details and don't even care enough to look it up, I still find the whole idea
of lions mating with tigers fascinating. Because it doesn't happen in laboratories or circus tents, it happens in the wild,
where lions and tigers live close together. That's what this thing said, anyway, although I find the whole thing very unlikely.
Don't lions and tigers live in totally different places? The whole thing has a very West Side Story feel to it.
Tigers don't travel in big groups like lions. They travel light, and do things their own way and make all their own rules.
Plus they are totally at the top of the food chain, so in a way they are like the Fonzies of the animal kingdom. Lions, on
the other hand, travel in these big groups and they all live together like communists, so I guess they're kind of like hippies.
Plus, the males make the females do all the hunting and killing, so they're not even cool hippies like Billy Jack: They're
mean, brutish hippies like that guy in the movie Forrest Gump who smacked Robin Wright around and then blamed it
on President Johnson, and Forrest kicked his ass. I guess I can kind of see why a female lion would be attracted to a male
tiger.
Growth Dysphasia
Female lions have a gene that they pass on to their kids that stops them from growing at a certain point, which is good,
because that way we don't have giant lions as big as King Kong eating us all. In tigers, the male carries the gene that controls
the babies' growth. That's why ligers are so enormously huge. Kind of like King Kong, except not gorillas.
This is called growth dysphasia. That's the scientific term for "enormously huge".
Insanity
Like monkeys and house cats and French people and every woman on earth, ligers are all insane.
Did you ever see a lion in the circus, when the lion tamer picks up a chair and walks towards him? The lion freaks out.
He doesn't know what to do, because, in nature, nothing walks toward a lion. Everything runs away from a lion. And
since they live purely by instinct, they don't know what to do. So they freak out.
Lions also have instincts that tell them they should live in prides and how they should establish social order. That's
what The Lion King was about. Tigers, on the other hand, aren't social animals. They live solitary lives and just
don't want anybody screwing with them, ever. Ligers inheirit both of these instincts and, predictably, they grow up depressed
and insane.
As a member of a really large family at Thanksgiving time, I can totally relate. I know I should want to be
with my large extended family, especially during the holidays. And this knowledge conflicts with the fact that I hate them
all.
Actually, that's a joke. I don't hate any of them, individually. But, like the tiger, I don't like being in crowds. I
don't like having to answer the same stupid questions over and over, and having people making the same comments and observations
over and over, even good ones. I'm going to count how many times this year I get asked how much weight I've lost.
So while I hate it, I still want my family to be happy. Just as long as I don't have to be in the room with them all.
So I totally feel for the Liger. Poor, freakishly huge, insane anti-social liger.
