San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park Visitors Enjoy Watching 8 Lion Cubs Play

On Friday keepers at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park gave eight lion cubs the opportunity to romp and play together without parental supervision and the cubs used the time to exhaust every last bit of energy by playing and chasing one another. These plays sessions are the beginning of the weaning process.

Seven of the cubs were born nine months ago to females Oshana and Mina at the Wild Animal Park. The cubs, three males and four females, spend the majority of their days with their mothers and father as a pride.

But every other day they join their cousin, 8-month-old Nyack, for a day of play.

Nyack spent the first few months of his life at the Park's nursery where he was nursed to health after his mother, Etosha, stopped caring for him. Nyack has since been introduced to his cousins for socialization and to teach him how to be a lion. In the next couple of months his male cousins, weighing approximately 140 pounds each, will be weaned from their mothers, a natural occurrence with lions, and will join Nyack in a male coalition. The female cubs will stay with their mothers a little longer before they too are weaned and form a female group.

The 1,800-acre San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park (more than half of which has been set aside as protected native species habitat) is operated by the not-for-profit Zoological Society of San Diego. The Zoological Society, dedicated to the conservation of endangered species and their habitats, engages in conservation and research work around the globe and is responsible for maintaining accredited horticultural, animal, library, and photo collections. The Zoological Society also manages the 100-acre San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Zoo's Beckman Center for Conservation Research. The important conservation and science work of these entities is supported in part by the Foundation for the Zoological Society of San Diego.