Just imagine trying to get a peaceful night's rest in your tent while camping only to be awakened by the growls of two huge and curious lions checking out your campsite. We seriously cannot imagine a scenario that's much more frightening than that. In this case, there's a video of just such an incident that documents what it is really like when a big cat is curious about your tent. We don't have any context regarding the circumstances of this video, such as where the camera was positioned to capture all this.
But it's undeniable that those are two very real, and large, lions—and those people have nothing but a thin sheet of nylon separating themselves from the jaws and claws. The male lion seems especially interested in a tent where a man comes face to face with the big cat through the mesh screen. The big cat even paws at the tent's fabric while the man yells, apparently trying to scare the lion away. It makes for a terrifying couple minutes of footage.
We aren't entirely sure what made these lions invade the camp. However, we highly doubt they were interested in killing or eating the tents' occupants. Humans aren't a natural prey for lions, and maneaters are rare. Their behavior seemed more curiosity than anything else. When the man in the tent started yelling, the lion simply wanted to know what was inside.
The music that kicked in about a minute into the video was probably an attempt to scare the animals off. It doesn't appear that it did these campers a whole lot of good. Those lions were too curious about the tents and the sounds coming from inside. In this case, it probably would have been best to just lie there and stay quiet until the lions lost interest in the campsite. Making noise and moving around was only going to help stimulate the cats' natural curiosity and predatory instincts into wanting to take a second look.
Whatever the circumstances of this video were, this serves as a reminder of why we have no desire to go camping in Africa anytime soon!
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and Instagram. For original videos, check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.
