Talking to Lions

“If a lion could speak,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “we could not understand him.” But I contend that of course lions do “speak” to us—they communicate in voice, in body language, and in action—and we Homo sapiens have long tried to understand them and sometimes succeeded. I would go even further and say that lions have tried to understand us too. In fact, as I will argue, the contact between humans and lions has sometimes shown evidence of mutual comprehension. It was a site-specific comprehension based on shared idiographic understanding, contoured by both our species’ intertwined pasts in a particular place. Admittedly, it was only a shifting and partial understanding and, as I will show, affected by the continuities and changes in human and (concomitantly) lion lifeways. To illustrate how this kind of multispecies history can be reconstructed, I focus on a very specific lion-human community. I will show that, at the very same time that Wittgenstein used the lion to illustrate the impossibility of such communication, a real lion-human community was speaking to each other and used this conversation to survive in a shared territory deep in the Kalahari Desert. I talk of two species, both apex predators, who learned to live together in a shared world. I reconstruct this peculiar pact as a way of thinking afresh about why and how we should tell more-than-human histories as part of protecting biodiversity. This is a new kind of history that challenges us to take seriously animal cultures—and how they change over time and how they can be co-constituted with our own. Entanglements between humans and other animals have shaped our pasts, but they suggest something more: possibilities for the future. The essay concludes by exploring the promise and limits of reconstructing these stories and their value in reimagining conservation or even just our everyday lives co-existing with other species in a more-than-human world.