Manimals: What is Mother Nature’s Manliest Creature? #9: The Lion

The alleged ‘King of Beasts' surely has the cojones to perform admirably in the Manimals stakes. Look at its face, replete with teethy bastardry! Its flagrant disregard for dental hygiene! Its appalling halitosis that could melt your face and dissolve a pair of leather boots from outside the tri-state area! From that expression, we can discern that the lion is either taking a massive, furious dump or objecting to his wife's endeavors to impose Lifetime TV while he's scratching his furry mansack on the couch ("Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks HAVE MAIL, you say? Shit to that,the game's on."). Whatever this bastard's doing, we'd venture that it's surely pretty damn badass.

What he's not doing, is inviting us to his forthcoming cordial dinner party ("Oh yes, do come by. It's a salutation to little Jimmy's graduation, you see. He was top in hisChewing on Man-Bollocksclass. Very proud, very proud indeed,") or something innocuous and/or flowery like that. Lions, as we know, are renegade badasses from the depths of Satan's foreskin. They have no shits to give for such pursuits. Have you ever seen one hawking cereal like the -presumably massively homosexual- Tony the Tiger? ("I like taking a surreptitious leer at other guys' mansacks at the urinals. It'sgrrrrrrrreat," quoth Tony.) You have not. These guys are more apt to bite Godzilla's face off and devour that. They give the righteous middle finger to breakfast cereals, however great a source of vitamin D they might be.

It was the ancient Romans who first determined the latent holy shit factor of these magnificent beasts. The notoriously uber-violent shenanigans in their arenas are testament to this. While these belligerent bastards were busy stabbing everyone else in the worldright in the face, they accrued a formidable array of wild animals from the lands they conquered. The most murderous of which were transported home in shit-stained cages. At the games, whoever had pissed the emperor off that week (prisoners of war, criminals, that guy that mooned him -"The son of a bitch doesn't appear to ever wipe his ass!" The affronted emperor shrieked, "UP WITH THIS I SHALL NOT PUT!") would be savaged in the groin/cleft into blood-bleeding specks of viscera and bone fragments. Naught but a shitstorm of a mess and a puddle of piss would remain, and the tumultuous applause of the spectators attested to two notions that are prevalent today: television can't compare with that shit, and you don't dick around with lions.

Their proclivity for man-eating remains contentious. There is certainly a raft of known attacks, fatal and otherwise. Lamentably, though, human cruelty towards lions has proved far more egregious. Since the days of yore (and gore) in the arena, they've been baited, hunted and -god forbid!- been pestered by those two ballaches Siegfried and Roy. Being coerced onto a stage while those guys dicked around in their flamboyantly spangly costumes was not an appropriately man-tastic pursuit for any lion.

Bonus manpoints are festooned upon these bitches for providing many an anti-climactic chlidhood zoo experience. They will ALWAYS be asleep/comatose/having a leisurely wank when you encroach upon their enclosure, despite being the only damn thing worth seeing in the whole establishment. After a morning of tedious garishly-hued tropical birds shitting on the floor, you wanted to behold something worthy. The canny canines knew this, and would feign sleep or death until the visitor exodus at the end of the day. Whereupon, they presumably erupt into vigorous, impeccably-choreographed dance routine; a la the zombies from Michael Jackson's Thriller video.

Most pertinently, though, they revel in sport as much as any of us dudely dudes, as this footage will attest: