Zoo lions fed whole carcasses ate almost three times longer and acted more like wild lions

Three nine-year-old male African lions at Monarto Safari Park in South Australia were given about 200 kilograms of whole kangaroo and goat carcasses every nine days, and on carcass days they spent an average of 76.4 minutes a day feeding. At baseline the same animals fed for 25.7 minutes a day. That is almost three times longer, and it came with a rhythm of gorging, resting and slow reactivation that mirrors how wild lions live.

The work comes from Adelaide University and the zoo, and it was published in August 2026 in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, volume 301, article 107041, and the university announced it through a release the same week. Lesia Hryhorenko of Adelaide’s School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences is the lead author.

Carcass days and the 76.4-minute meal

The design was simple. A three-male test group had a four-week baseline from 10 February 2025, then an eight-week phase in which carcasses arrived every nine days on top of an existing feast-and-fast routine, according to the university’s copy of the paper. Each carcass stayed available for up to three days, and then the lions rested and digested. Eight infrared cameras recorded around the clock, taking a 10-second clip every five minutes, and behavior was scored at five-minute intervals.

Carcass days averaged 76.4 minutes of feeding, against 25.7 at baseline, a difference reported at p below 0.001. Adelaide’s own summary puts it as “almost three times longer feeding” than normal, with bouts that were more frequent and longer and with more tearing, pulling and manipulating of the meat.

One caution sits in the numbers. Averaged by month rather than by carcass day, feeding rose from 0.97 percent of observations at baseline to 2.33 percent in month one and 1.89 percent in month two, and that monthly effect was not statistically significant (p = 0.11).

Lying down, pacing and the wild template

After meals the lions lay down far more. In the breakdown reported by Earth.com, lying made up 52.5 percent of observations on days one to three of each cycle, 30.4 percent on days four to six and 17.0 percent on days seven to nine, so activity climbed back as the fast went on. Adelaide describes the result as a cycle similar to wild feast-and-fast patterns. Wild lions generally feed every 1.5 to 2.5 days, though fasts of up to eight days have been seen.

Hryhorenko drew the contrast with ordinary zoo practice: “Wild lions don’t eat at the same time every day.” She added that “providing whole carcasses changes much more than the nutritional content of the diet.” Alexandra Whittaker, an associate professor at Adelaide and a co-author, noted that many zoo studies look only at what happens right after food is provided, whereas this one followed behavior for days afterward.

Pacing, often read as a sign of stress in captive carnivores, rose slightly over the study, from 1.79 percent of observations at baseline to 3.83 percent in the second month (p = 0.0097). It did not build steadily during fasts, though. Peaks fell around 9 to 10 in the morning and 3 to 4 in the afternoon, when keepers arrived and lions were shifted between enclosure areas, which the authors tie to predictable routines instead of hunger.

Aggression, sample size and the limits of three lions

The paper reports no numerical aggression data for the carcass phase, but its discussion states that no increase in aggression or social instability was observed around the carcasses. That matters for any zoo weighing a whole-carcass routine for a group of males, since a food source that large could in principle have sharpened competition between animals that share an enclosure.

The limits are plain in the methods. The test group was three animals, all adult males, so the result says little about prides with females or cubs. A control group of four lions, two three-year-old males and two five-year-old females, differed in sex and age structure, and the paper made no between-group comparisons during the carcass phase. Behavior was scored at group level, which hides individual variation, and enclosure access changed during the carcass phase, which may have affected pacing and visibility. There were no physiological or nutritional measures, and everything happened at one facility. The authors, in the version of the university release distributed to newsrooms, suggest pairing future behavioral observations with physiological measures to assess animal welfare more directly. Until that work exists, the clearest claim the data support is a behavioral one: with whole carcasses on the menu, three zoo lions fed in a pattern much closer to the wild template.

The ScienceDaily write-up that circulated in October carried the same three-male design. The sharpest single figure stays the one in the paper: 76.4 minutes against 25.7.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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