Recently I talked with a man who had just returned from East Africa, where, he said, the lions were perfectly harmless and had to be shooed out of the way; but if I were he I should not bank too heavily on this experience with lions. I recall reading in the papers a number of years ago of a lion that escaped in the London Zoo being chased back into its cage by a young man, with an umbrella. On the other hand, my old friend Charlie Gay of Gay's Lion Farm at El Monte,California, has been badly mauled by lions he had been working with daily. I think that the occasions upon which lions will attack a man are astonishingly few in comparison with those upon which they might be expected to attack, for it must be remembered that lions are extremely nervous and temperamental and that they attack more often because of fright than because of ferocity. Two occurrences which I witnessed rather bear this out. One took place on a Tarzan set a number of years ago where I was watching the shooting of a lion sequence with my little daughter, then only a small child.
