What I've Learned

A male lion is a brawler. If he is the dominant male, he fights other males who challenge him for the position. If he is not the dominant male, he fights to work his way up.

His main weapons, of course, are claws and jaws.

Lions, which can weigh as much as 500 pounds, tend to stand on three legs and strike with one paw, aiming at the opponent's face and neck. It looks like slap boxing, but the slaps are actually slashes with claws that are four inches long and brutally sharp.

Another tactic is to latch on with the front claws, almost like hugging, then rake the body of an enemy with the hind claws, pumping the back legs in spasmodic jerks. House cats will do this to your arm if you play too rough with them.

Lions have large, pointed teeth and powerful jaws. They go for the neck, either throat or backside, and can sink those teeth in deep and rip and tear with savage shakes of the head. To help protect against biting and clawing attacks to the neck, male lions have a thick, bushy mane. The mane also makes the animal appear bigger than it is.

Tigers, by contrast, rarely fight other big cats. Their habitat doesn't usually contain lions, and, except to mate, tigers tend to avoid each other.

When a tiger does fight, it has impressive skills. Instead of standing on three paws and slashing with one, it rears up on its hind legs and slashes with both front paws at once.

Tigers, like lions, have powerful jaws and sharp teeth, and kill with devastating bites to the neck. A tiger's mouth is larger than that of a lion.

So, what happens if a lion and a tiger meet?

That depends.

If they are male and female and the female is in heat, the two are as apt to engage in cross species mating as in fighting. If both animals are male, however, there is for sure going to be a fight.

On a number of occasions, such fights have been captured on film. One of the most notable is in the 1933 movie, The Big Cage, about a circus that tries to save itself from financial ruin by staging an act with lions and tigers in the same cage at the same time.

During the setup for a scene, an East African lion and a Bengal tiger got into an unscripted fight. Cameras were ready to roll, so the incident was filmed. The script was then rewritten to make the footage part of the plot.

The fight is terrifying in its intensity. For the movie, the brutal fray was edited and parts of it shown out of sequence. Scenes of the two cats clawing and biting each other were intercut with human actors – filmed afterwards – trying to figure out how to stop the fight. The movie shows the two beasts being separated by high pressure water from a fire hose and each trotting off to its cage, but that's not what actually happened.

In real life, the lion killed the tiger.

Lion fans (referring to the animal, not the football team) reference this as proof of the lion's superiority, saying that a lion will almost always kill a tiger.

Tiger fans (note the above qualifier, but change football to baseball) discount this and refer to other incidents in which tigers were victorious.

Be all that as it may, the lion/tiger fight in The Big Cage inspired efforts to provide greater safety for animals in movies. Today when you see a disclaimer on a theater screen: "No animals were hurt in the making of this movie," you can thank the lion and tiger in 1933 who fought to the death and had their battle shown for entertainment.