Avoca male lions

[Duco Ndona]

Lions resort to all their available senses to recognize eachother. Scent is an important one, but they also know who is who by voice, vision and such. Afteral they also recognize contact calls, or each other during a rainstorm. So if a meeting comes to a point where a decision has to be made of fight, flight or friend. They are close enough to have access to plenty of information to recognize eachother.

It makes more sense for a lion to be better at recognizing and remembering individual lions over individual humans. So that they are recognizing caretakers from that long back is a good reason to believe that they can recognize lions from even longer back.

I think the role scent plays is that all the rubbing and bonding forms a group scent that overlays the personal scent of a lion. This scent functions as a bit of a passport that can linger for a long time, and does erode over time. But its not a sacret golden rule or anything. If a lion loses it and the rest has no reason to believe the lion is out of the group, they happily reapply it. And if they kick a member out, the lingering scent isnt going to fool them to let him or her back in again.

In the avocas case, the suriving Avoca would have zero traces of his old scent passport and left over traces of its passport of his current coalition. While there is no good reason for Mohawk to believe for his long lost brother to come back to him after all those years. For all he knows they might be there to drive him out. Reply