The Lion and the Zebra

This is a story about a lion who fell in love with a zebra.

Actually that's a lie.

They didn't fall in love. Love had nothing to do with it. Let's take love out of the equation. They fell into animal attraction.

When you think about it, it doesn't seem that unlikely on the part of the lion does it? I mean, lions prey on zebras all the time, so there's obviously something biologically programmed into the lion to make it want to chase after zebras. And there's all those stripes. The stripes help.

But the zebra...the zebra should have known better. The zebra would have seen the lion coming, and everything in that zebra should have been telling it to run away. But maybe this zebra didn't have an internal alarm system. Or maybe this zebra was just tired. Or maybe this zebra was curious. No matter what, the choice to stay was pretty risky. The zebra is definitely risking more in this scenario.

Let's skip ahead to the part where the zebra and the lion recognize what a ridiculous position they're in. They can't just go strolling around the savanna together, and there's nowhere they could go to make the zebra not a zebra, or the lion not a lion.

It seems that eventually they would come to an unspoken impasse. But neither party would be willing to make the ultimatum. The zebra could never ask the lion to give up eating zebras, that would just be unreasonable. And the lion would never stop the zebra from looking for a more species-appropriate mate.

So the story has a very unsatisfying ending. The world is just not ready for lions and zebras to be together. But that's okay, because truthfully the lion and zebra weren't ready either. They weren't thinking. Who could ever imagine a lion with a zebra?